Cybersecurity of Critical Infrastructure in Water Distribution Systems
Additional Funding Sources
This research project is funded by Dr. Hoda Mehrpouyan's NSF CAREER Award No. 1846493.
Presentation Date
7-2021
Abstract
Since the discovery of Stuxnet in 2011, the rate of cyber-attacks against critical infrastructures carried out by both likely state-funded actors and independent groups has increased consistently year-on-year. Water systems have not been immune to this, and have more recently seemed to be directly in the firing line. While considerable effort is being undertaken to alert the industry to this issue and train against the most common types of IT attacks, considerably fewer resources exist for helping design and test secure systems from an OT perspective, or for the training of technicians, administrators, and cybersecurity teams in how to analyze and secure their water systems from the OT side. Promising research in building cyber modeling and testing toolkits on top of hydraulic simulators such as EPANET is being carried out, however, and offers free, open-source tools such as epanetCPA and RISKNOUGHT for creating and utilizing simulated cyber-physical systems for these purposes, as well as for the purpose of training AI and ML in detecting anomalies and potential attacks in such systems. However, key barriers still exist to the use of these platforms, and it is our intention to both discuss the importance of these systems and the importance of lowering the barriers to entry to encourage their use. We present a simple GUI-based tool, inp2cpa, for the processing of hydraulic input (.inp) files into usable Cyber-Physical Attack modeling files (.cpa) for use within these toolkits, as well as a guide and walkthrough on how to best utilize P&ID documents in coordination with this toolkit to more easily and accurately model the behavior of your cyber-physical water systems.
Cybersecurity of Critical Infrastructure in Water Distribution Systems
Since the discovery of Stuxnet in 2011, the rate of cyber-attacks against critical infrastructures carried out by both likely state-funded actors and independent groups has increased consistently year-on-year. Water systems have not been immune to this, and have more recently seemed to be directly in the firing line. While considerable effort is being undertaken to alert the industry to this issue and train against the most common types of IT attacks, considerably fewer resources exist for helping design and test secure systems from an OT perspective, or for the training of technicians, administrators, and cybersecurity teams in how to analyze and secure their water systems from the OT side. Promising research in building cyber modeling and testing toolkits on top of hydraulic simulators such as EPANET is being carried out, however, and offers free, open-source tools such as epanetCPA and RISKNOUGHT for creating and utilizing simulated cyber-physical systems for these purposes, as well as for the purpose of training AI and ML in detecting anomalies and potential attacks in such systems. However, key barriers still exist to the use of these platforms, and it is our intention to both discuss the importance of these systems and the importance of lowering the barriers to entry to encourage their use. We present a simple GUI-based tool, inp2cpa, for the processing of hydraulic input (.inp) files into usable Cyber-Physical Attack modeling files (.cpa) for use within these toolkits, as well as a guide and walkthrough on how to best utilize P&ID documents in coordination with this toolkit to more easily and accurately model the behavior of your cyber-physical water systems.