Threat Analysis of Natural Gas Control System Based on Physical Process Constraints

Abstract

Natural gas is one of the essential energy sources for daily life. The increased reliance on energy makes control systems attractive targets for attackers. This paper explains how the control network works and describes the negative influence of attacking physical process. The paper proposes denial-of-service (DoS) attacks model and integrity attacks for the control system. In addition, our work focus on analyzing triethylene glycol (TEG) dehydration process flow for discovering the influencing factors, operational constraints and safety constraints in the dehydration process. Then, we evaluate physical and economic influences for DoS attacks and integrity attacks on TEG dehydration process in our physical testbed. The consequence shows that these kinds of attacks scenarios will drive the plant into an unsafe state. Finally, we propose an effective mechanism to defense DoS attacks and integrity attacks on TEG dehydration process.