EDSGuard: Enforcing Network Security Requirements for Energy Delivery Systems
V. Coughlin, C. Rubio-Medrano, Z. Zhao and G.J. Ahn
Abstract
Recently, energy delivery systems (EDS) have been targeted by sophisticated network-based attacks tailored to disrupt the proper distribution of energy among different geographical regions, resulting in non-trivial socio-economical loses and a loss of public confidence in EDS infrastructures. Such attacks were facilitated by the lack of native security measures regarding existing network communication protocols for EDS, which allowed attackers to deliberately manipulate the state of network connections between control modules and field devices. In order to address these concerns, this paper presents EDSGuard, a state-based firewall and monitoring tool that leverages state-ofthe-art packet inspection techniques along with software-defined networks (SDN), to intelligently implement a set of security requirements and best practices for protecting EDS networks, as issued by regulatory organizations within the EDS community in the last years. In addition, EDSGuard implements a series of first-response countermeasure strategies, which can automatically react to anomalies and attacks detected in EDS networks, thus effectively mitigating their consequences and overall impact as a result. We provide the overall rationale behind our approach, as well as a description of our experimental results depicting a set of realistic attack scenarios, which provide evidence of the suitability of EDSGuard for being fully adopted in practice.
Copyright Notice
This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.
- The following copyright notice applies to all of the above items that appear in IEEE publications: "Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/publish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from IEEE."
- The following copyright notice applies to all of the above items that appear in ACM publications: " ACM, effective the year of publication shown in the bibliographic information. This file is the authors version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in the journal or proceedings indicated in the bibliographic data for each item."
- The following copyright notice applies to all of the above items that appear in IFAC publications: "Document is being reproduced under permission of the Copyright Holder. Use or reproduction of the Document is for informational or personal use only."