Secure Automated Forensic Investigation for Sustainable Critical Infrastructures Compliant with Green Computing Requirements

Abstract

SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) networks are built to efficiently provide supervisory and control of national and international critical infrastructures. SCADA networks represent a challenging domain for forensic investigators who have the responsibility to discover the main causes of the catastrophic incidents that could happen in these critical mission systems and provide precise and logical evidences supported with comprehensive technical reports to the legal organizations. They urgently need technological tools and frameworks that enable them to effectively do their mission without affecting the running state of SCADA networks which must be sustainable and robust against technical and disruptive incidents. This paper discusses the challenges and opportunities towards achieving that goal and highlights the emerging technological approaches and paradigms that can be considered as promising for the realization of such a framework taking into account the efficient consumption of computational resources. Further, this paper proposes a conceptual framework for automated and secure forensic investigation in modern complex SCADA networks accompanied with a possible realization architecture based on the Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) promising technological paradigms. The proposed framework is intentionally designed to be compliant with the currently active motivation towards promoting green computing requirements.