Abstract

Decentralized Critical infrastructure management systems will play a key role in reducing costs and improving the quality of service of industrial processes, such as electricity production. The recent malwares (e.g. Stuxnet) revealed several vulnerabilities in today's Distributed Control Systems (DCS), but most importantly they highlighted the lack of an efficient scientific approach to conduct experiments that measure the impact of cyber threats on both the physical and the cyber parts of Networked Critical Infrastructures (NCIs). The study of those complex systems, either physical or cyber, could be carried out by experimenting with real systems, software simulators or emulators. Experimentation with production systems suffers from the inability to control the experiment environment. On the other hand the development of a dedicated experimentation infrastructure with real components is often economically prohibitive and disruptive experiments on top of it could be a risk to safety. In this paper, we focus on the implementation of a Cyber-Physical (CP) testbed which includes physical equipment. We illustrate and the cyber security issues on the communication channel between the Critical Infrastructures(CIs), such as a power grid, a nuclear plant and the energy market. We simulate the power grid network (including nuclear plant), but we emulate the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) part which is the focus of our work. Within this context we assume that we are able to implement scenarios, which produce consequences on the normal operation of the power power grid and the financial area.

Highlights

  • E UROPEAN security, both physical and economic, rests upon a foundation of highly interdependent critical infrastructures

  • The recent malwares (e.g. Stuxnet) revealed several vulnerabilities in today’s Distributed Control Systems (DCS), but most importantly they highlighted the lack of an efficient scientific approach to conduct experiments that measure the impact of cyber threats on both the physical and the cyber parts of Networked Critical Infrastructures (NCIs)

  • Assessment platform for Multiple Interdependent Critical Infrastructures (AMICI) provides a broad range of grid models to experiment with, including the Western System Coordinating Council’s (WSCC) 3-machine 9-bus system, and the 30-bus, 39-bus and 118-bus test cases, which represent a portion of the American Electric Power System as of early 1960

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Summary

INTRODUCTION

E UROPEAN security, both physical and economic, rests upon a foundation of highly interdependent critical infrastructures. We examine the complexity of the infrastructure interdependency and highlight the relevant cyber security impact. We explore the complexity of the infrastructure interdependency security issues and we design a testbed (Fig. 1), which combines:. Simulated power stock market, emulated ICT controlling infrastructure, and real physical equipments, i.e. Programmable Logical. Based on this implementation, the Network & Information Security Laboratory (NIS Lab) created a cyber-physical system/prototype in order to underline and motivate the need for modeling multiple interconnected critical infrastructures, since the behavior of an interconnected one can be propagated.

RELATED WORK
EXPERIMENTATION FRAMEWORK OVERVIEW
The controlling ICT network
Description of Nuclear Plant
Power market
Integration into AMICI
Experimental Setup
Scenarios
CONCLUSIONS AND FURTHER RESEARCH
Full Text
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