A Practical flow white list approach for SCADA systems

Abstract

The blatant vulnerability of industrial control systems, including those controlling critical infrastructure, is now well known. There is a need for immediately applicable security solutions that do not interfere with normal operations. Intrusion detection through flow white listing is an approach that can detect multiple components of modern attacks such as pivoting and command and control channels. However, the white list approach is not compatible with current black listbased IDS technology. This paper presents a practical approach for implementing flow white listing in SCADA system. The approach extracts a flow white list from a known good packet capture and inverts the decision logic to programmatically generate a rule set that can be consumed by a black list-based IDS. A performance evaluation shows that the approach is viable for SCADA systems, where the number of communication pairs is limited and traffic is mostly deterministic.

Contributors

Antoine Lemay

Jonathan Rochon

José M. Fernandez

Conference

Publication date: October 2016

Publication date (Print): October 2016

Pages: 23-31

Affiliations

École Polytechnique de Montréal

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/ICS2016.4

Copyright statement: © Lemay et al. Published byLearning & Development LtdProceedings of the 4th International Symposium for ICS & SCADA Cyber Security Research 2016

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: 4th International Symposium for ICS & SCADA Cyber Security Research 2016

Conference acronym: ICS-CSR

Conference number: 4

Conference location: Queen’s Belfast University, UK

Conference date: 23 - 25 August 2016

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Cyber Security Research

Product

Product Information: 1477-9358BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/ICS2016.4

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

Categories

Series title: Electronic Workshops in Computing