Energy systems like smart grids are part of critical infrastructure and their interruption or blackout may have fatal consequences on energy production, distribution, and eventually the life of individual people. In order to secure communication in Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and detect cyber attacks on smart grids, we need to increase visibility of ICS communication so that an operator can see what commands are sent between ICS devices. Security monitoring of ICS transmission requires (i) retrieving monitoring data from ICS packets, (ii) processing and analyzing extracted data, (iii) visualizing the ongoing communication to the operator. The proposed work presents a concept of ICS flow monitoring system that extracts meta data from ICS packet headers and creates ICS flow records similarly to Netflow/IPFIX system. ICS flows represent communication in the smart grid network that is further visualized using dashboard and communication charts. Unlike traditional monitoring approach that works with network and transport layer data only, we extend flow monitoring to application layer with focus on ICS protocols. The proposed approach is demonstrated on monitoring IEC 60870-5-104 communication.
Network monitoring is an essential task of network management. Information obtained by monitoring devices gives a real picture of the network in production including transmitted data volumes, top hosts, a list of frequently used applications etc. Deep analysis of data collected by monitoring can reveal network attacks or detect misuse of network services. In addition, Data Retention Act requires each ISP to track user's activities. Protocol IPv6 puts new challenges for network administrators in the context of user identification. Unlike IPv4, an IPv6 address no longer uniquely identifies a user or Pc. IPv6 address can be randomly generated and keeps changing in time. pes with IPv6stack can also communicate via predefined tunnels over IPv4 infrastructure. That tunneled traffic mostly bypasses network security implemented via firewalls. In this paper, we identify major monitoring and security issues of IPv6 connectivity and propose a solution based on SNMP and Netflow data that helps to uniquely identify users. The solution requires an extended set of monitoring data to be collected from network devices.We present a new data structure based on extended Netflow records. Feasibility of the approach is demonstrated on the Brno University of Technology (BUT) campus network.
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