Nearly every aspect of modern life today, from businesses, transportation, and healthcare, depends on the power grid operating safely and reliably. While the recent push for a “Smart Grid” has shown promise for increased efficiency, security has often been an afterthought, leaving this critical infrastructure vulnerable to a variety of cyber attacks. For instance, devices crucial to the safe operation of the power grid are left in remote substations with their configuration interfaces completely open, providing a vector for outsiders as well as insiders to launch an attack. This paper develops the framework for an overlay network of gateway devices that provide authenticated access control and security monitoring for these vulnerable interfaces. We develop a working prototype of such a device and simulate the performance of deployment throughout a substation. Our results suggest that such a system can be deployed with negligible impact on normal operations, while providing important security mechanisms. By doing so, we demonstrate that our proposal is a practical and efficient solution for retro-fitting security onto crucial power system devices.

ICS security has been a topic of scrutiny and research for several years, and many security issues are well known. However, research efforts are impeded by a lack of an open virtual industrial control system testbed for security research. This thesis describes a virtual testbed framework using Python to create discrete testbed components (including virtual devices and process simulators). This testbed is designed such that the testbeds are interoperable with real ICS devices and that the virtual testbeds can provide comparable ICS network behavior to a laboratory testbed. Two testbeds based on laboratory testbeds have been developed and have been shown to be interoperable with real industrial control systemequipment and vulnerable to attacks in the samemanner as a real system. Additionally, these testbeds have been quantitatively shown to produce traffic close to laboratory systems (within 90% similarity on most metrics).

Critical infrastructures like oil & gas, power grids, water treatment facilities, domain name system (DNS) etc., are attractive targets for attackers — both due to the potential impact of attacks on such systems, and due to the enormous attack surface exposed by such systems. Unwarranted functionality in the form of accidental bugs or maliciously inserted hidden functionality in any component of a system could potentially be exploited by attackers to launch attacks on the system. As it is far from practical to root out undesired functionality in every component of a complex system, it is essential to develop security measures for protecting CI systems that rely only on the integrity of a small number of carefully constructed components, identified as the trusted computing base (TCB) for the system. The broad aim of this dissertation is to characterize elements of the TCB for critical infrastructure systems, and outline strategies to leverage the TCB to secure CI systems. A unified provider-middleman-consumer (PMC) view of systems was adopted to characterize systems as being constituted by providers of data, untrusted middlemen, and consumers of data. As the goal of proposed approach is to eliminate the need to trust most components of a system to be secured, most components of the system are considered to fall under the category of “untrusted middlemen.” From this perspective, the TCB for the system is a minimal set of trusted functionality required to verify that the tasks performed by the middle-men will not result in violation of the desired assurances. Specific systems that were investigated in this dissertation work to characterize the minimal TCB included the domain name system (DNS), dynamic DNS, and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems that monitor/control various CI systems. For such systems, this dissertation provides a comprehensive functional specification of the TCB, and outlines security protocols that leverage the trust in TCB functionality to realize the desired assurances regarding the system.

In March 2000, 1 million litres of raw sewage was released into the water system of Maroochy Shire on Queensland’s sunshine coast. This environmental disaster was caused by a disgruntled ex-contractor using a radio transmitter to illicitly access the electronically controlled pumps in the control system. In 2007 CNN screened video footage of an experimental attack against a electrical generator. The attack caused the generator to shake and smoke, visually showing the damage caused by cyber attack. These attacks highlight the importance of securing the control systems which our critical infrastructures depend on. This thesis addresses securing control systems, focusing on securing the communications for supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. We review the architectures of SCADA systems and produce a list of the system constraints that relate to securing these systems. With these constraints in mind, we survey both the existing work in information and SCADA security, observing the need to investigate further the problem of secure communications for SCADA systems. We then present risk modelling techniques, and model the risk in a simple SCADA system, using the ISM, a software tool for modelling information security risk. In modelling the risk, we verify the hypothesis that securing the communications channel is an essential part of an effective security strategy for SCADA systems. After looking at risk modelling, and establishing the value of securing communications, we move on to key management for SCADA systems. Appropriate key management techniques are a crucial part of secure communications, and form an important part of the contributions made in this work. We present a key management protocol that has been designed to run under the constraints specific to SCADA systems. A reductionist security proof is developed for a simplified version of the protocol, showing it is secure in the Bellare Rogaway model.

This is a master’s thesis project entitled “Secure reprogramming of network connected devices”. The thesis begins by providing some background information to enable the reader to understand the current vulnerabilities of network-connected devices, specifically with regard to cyber security and data integrity. Today supervisory control and data acquisition systems utilizing network connected programmable logic controllers are widely used in many industries and critical infrastructures. These network-attached devices have been under increasing attack for some time by malicious attackers (including in some cases possibly government supported efforts). This thesis evaluates currently available solutions to mitigate these attacks. Based upon this evaluation a new solution based on the Trusted Computing Group (TCG’s) Trusted Platform Modules (TPM) specification is proposed. This solution utilizes a lightweight version of TPM and TCG’s Reliable Computing Machine (RCM) to achieve the desired security. The security of the proposed solution is evaluated both theoretically and using a prototype. This evaluation shows that the proposed solution helps to a great extent to mitigate the previously observed vulnerabilities when reprogramming network connected devices. The main result of this thesis project is a secure way of reprogramming these network attached devices so that only a valid user can successfully reprogram the device and no one else can reprogram the device (either to return it to an earlier state, perhaps with a known attack vector, or even worse prevent a valid user from programming the device). / Avhandlingen börjar med att ge lite bakgrundsinformation för att läsaren att förstå de nuvarande sårbarheten i nätverksanslutna enheter, särskilt när det gäller IT-säkerhet och dataintegritet. Idag övervakande kontroll och datainsamlingssystem använder nätverksanslutna programmerbara styrsystem används allmänt i många branscher och kritisk infrastruktur. Dessa nätverk anslutna enheter har under ökande attacker under en tid av illvilliga angripare (inklusive i vissa fall eventuellt regeringen stöds insatser). Denna avhandling utvärderar för närvarande tillgängliga lösningar för att minska dessa attacker. Baserat på denna utvärdering en ny lösning baserad på Trusted Computing Group (TCG) Trusted Platform Modules (TPM) specifikation föreslås. Denna lösning använder en lätt version av TPM och TCG:s pålitliga dator (RCM) för att uppnå önskad säkerhet. Säkerheten i den föreslagna lösningen utvärderas både teoretiskt och med hjälp av en prototyp. Utvärderingen visar att den föreslagna lösningen bidrar i stor utsträckning för att minska de tidigare observerade sårbarheter när omprogrammering nätverksanslutna enheter.  Huvudresultatet av denna avhandling projektet är ett säkert sätt omprogrammering dessa nätverksanslutna enheter så att endast ett giltigt användarnamn framgångsrikt kan omprogrammera enheten och ingen annan kan programmera enheten (antingen att återställa den till ett tidigare tillstånd, kanske med en känd attack vector, eller ännu värre förhindra en giltig användare från programmering av enheten).