Patching our Critical Infrastructure

Abstract

Worm epidemics such as Stuxnet and Conficker have raised great interest in the public and media lately and stressed the question of how our critical infrastructure can be protected against such attacks. Besides reactive measures like incident response, pro-active counter measures are required. Patch management is such an essential pro-active measure for the secure operation of our critical infrastructure. It is an indispensable activity which is required in many standards. This chapter focuses on patch and update management for industrial control systems that are part of our critical infrastructure. Standards for the automation of patch management and selected operational security standards are discussed in the context of patch management. The main contribution of the chapter is the definition and description of a standard conform patch management process for industrial control systems with special focus on the interaction between operator and vendor of such systems.