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Design and Implementation of Full-Scale Industrial Control System Test Bed for Assessing Cyber-Security Defenses

Publication Type
Conference Paper
Book Title
2020 International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks: Workshop on Communication, Computing, and Networking in Cyber Physical Systems (WoWMoM-CCNCPS'2020)
Publication Date
Page Numbers
341 to 346
Conference Name
6th IEEE International workshop on Communication Computing and Networking in Cyber Physical Systems
Conference Location
Cork, Ireland
Conference Sponsor
IEEE
Conference Date
-

In response to the increasing awareness of the Ethernet-based threat surface of industrial control systems (ICS), both the research and commercial communities are responding with ICS-specific security solutions. Unfortunately, many of the properties of ICS environments that contribute to the extent of this threat surface (e.g. age of devices, inability or unwillingness to patch, criticality of the system) similarly prevent the proper testing and evaluation of these security solutions. Production environments are often too fragile to introduce unvetted technology and most organizations lack test environments that are sufficiently consistent with production to yield actionable results. Cost and space requirements prevent the creation of mirrored physical environments leading many to look towards simulation or virtualization. Examples in literature provide various approaches to building ICS test beds, though most of these suffer from a lack of realism due to contrived scenarios, synthetic data and other compromises. In this paper, we provide a design methodology for building highly realistic ICS test beds for validating cybersecurity defenses. We then apply that methodology to the design and building of a specific test bed and describe the results and experimental use cases.