Cyber-Physical Security of SCADA Systems Against Physical Faults, Cyber Threats and Generic Malicious Attacks

As Critical Infrastructures are becoming more complex and vital for modern societies, their management, monitoring and protection becomes of paramount importance, specially in safety-critical situations. Several studies are being carried out in the last years, having the objective of enhancing the security level and highlighting any vulnerability of these. It is clear that tests cannot be performed directly on real infrastructures due to security and safety issues, hence the development of realistic emulated environments becomes essential. Moreover, the scientific community has often considered and studied separately the cyber and physical domains constituting these complex systems, whilst it is essential to consider the overall environments, for example analyzing how cyber events may affect the operative condition of the physical infrastructure, as well as how anomalies in the physical dimension may generate a critical situation with respect to the Industrial Control Systems’ monitoring architecture. Having this problem in mind, a wide study on Industrial Control Systems is carried out, analyzing their constituting components, evolution and vulnerabilities. It is then followed by an analysis of the state-of-the-art on the diagnosis of physical faults and an overview of the cyber threats that these systems face. Making good use of these studies and being aware of the security concerns of cyber-physical systems, an innovative testbed reproducing the operation of a water infrastructure has been developed. In the designed system it is possible to introduce several types of physical faults and/or cyber anomalies, as well as to implement different configurations in order to test several scenarios and control strategies. The testbed is here described in detail, and its effectiveness regarding cyber-physical concerns is illustrated via several experimental tests.