Publicação
PICSEL: Portable ICS Extensible Lab
| Resumo: | Critical infrastructures such as electric power grids, nuclear plants, oil and gas refineries, transportations systems or pharmaceutical industries, play an increasingly important role in our lives due to technological advancement and the precision industry. Traditionally, most of these infrastructures, also called industrial control systems (ICS), are large-scale cyber-physical systems (CPS) which all use supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA). Over recent years, malicious actors have realized the importance and impact of these infrastructures. Combining this with the deprivation of security features in ICS resulted in a large quantity of high value targets just waiting to be exploited. Since these systems are based on equipment with a really long lifetime and, in most of the cases, have an extremely high availability requirement, its important to, somehow, gather information and perform security tests in order to protect these infrastructures, without compromising a live operation. Normally these infrastructures are very complex and often have a remarkable diversity of equipment, communication protocols and transmission technologies. This thesis presents a portable testbed, PICSEL, which was designed and developed to achieve the following goals: to be a portable testbed testing existing exploits and new security solutions whilst exploring new vulnerabilities within the equipment or the environment. Several requirements were considered in the design of the testbed: for instance, choosing the equipment that allowed for more environment configurations; choosing power supplies that support additional equipment; and designing a static electrical diagram based on each device’s requirements. With these requirements, the testbed must be able to support different types of equipment and architectures, allowing for applications in multiple industries, inside which it can be easily reconfigured. The thesis describes the testbed architecture and discusses the design decisions, presenting two test scenarios that were studied and implemented using PICSEL. In each of these test scenarios, different attacks were performed validating each of the PICSEL goals. Testing known vulnerabilities, testing exploits in the wild and exporting information from PICSEL equipment to an external tool were very important steps to validate the results. Therefore, this thesis provides proof of concept confirming the key value of a modular and reconfigurable testbed, PICSEL. |
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| Autores principais: | Vieira, Marco Manuel Santos |
| Assunto: | PICSEL Modular SCADA ICS Security Trabalhos de projeto de mestrado - 2020 |
| Ano: | 2020 |
| País: | Portugal |
| Tipo de documento: | dissertação de mestrado |
| Tipo de acesso: | acesso aberto |
| Instituição associada: | Universidade de Lisboa |
| Idioma: | inglês |
| Origem: | Repositório da Universidade de Lisboa |
| Resumo: | Critical infrastructures such as electric power grids, nuclear plants, oil and gas refineries, transportations systems or pharmaceutical industries, play an increasingly important role in our lives due to technological advancement and the precision industry. Traditionally, most of these infrastructures, also called industrial control systems (ICS), are large-scale cyber-physical systems (CPS) which all use supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA). Over recent years, malicious actors have realized the importance and impact of these infrastructures. Combining this with the deprivation of security features in ICS resulted in a large quantity of high value targets just waiting to be exploited. Since these systems are based on equipment with a really long lifetime and, in most of the cases, have an extremely high availability requirement, its important to, somehow, gather information and perform security tests in order to protect these infrastructures, without compromising a live operation. Normally these infrastructures are very complex and often have a remarkable diversity of equipment, communication protocols and transmission technologies. This thesis presents a portable testbed, PICSEL, which was designed and developed to achieve the following goals: to be a portable testbed testing existing exploits and new security solutions whilst exploring new vulnerabilities within the equipment or the environment. Several requirements were considered in the design of the testbed: for instance, choosing the equipment that allowed for more environment configurations; choosing power supplies that support additional equipment; and designing a static electrical diagram based on each device’s requirements. With these requirements, the testbed must be able to support different types of equipment and architectures, allowing for applications in multiple industries, inside which it can be easily reconfigured. The thesis describes the testbed architecture and discusses the design decisions, presenting two test scenarios that were studied and implemented using PICSEL. In each of these test scenarios, different attacks were performed validating each of the PICSEL goals. Testing known vulnerabilities, testing exploits in the wild and exporting information from PICSEL equipment to an external tool were very important steps to validate the results. Therefore, this thesis provides proof of concept confirming the key value of a modular and reconfigurable testbed, PICSEL. |
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