CryPLH: Protecting Smart Energy Systems from Targeted Attacks with a PLC Honeypot

Abstract

Smart grids consist of suppliers, consumers, and other parts. The main suppliers are normally supervised by industrial control systems. These systems rely on programmable logic controllers (PLCs) to control industrial processes and communicate with the supervisory system. Until recently, industrial operators relied on the assumption that these PLCs are isolated from the online world and hence cannot be the target of attacks. Recent events, such as the infamous Stuxnet attack [15] directed the attention of the security and control system community to the vulnerabilities of control system elements, such as PLCs. In this paper, we design and implement the Crysys PLC honeypot (CryPLH) system to detect targeted attacks against industrial control systems. This PLC honeypot can be implemented as part of a larger security monitoring system. Our honeypot implementation improves upon existing solutions in several aspects: most importantly in level of interaction and ease of configuration. Results of an evaluation show that our honeypot is largely indistinguishable from a real device from the attacker’s perspective. As a collateral of our analysis, we were able to identify some security issues in the real PLC device we tested and implemented specific firewall rules to protect the device from targeted attacks.