Improvement of nuclear facilities DNP3 protocol data transmission security using super encryption BRC4 in SCADA systems

Abstract

Background Data transmissions using the DNP3 protocol over the internet in SCADA systems are vulnerable to interruption, interception, fabrication, and modification through man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. This research aims to improve the security of DNP3 data transmissions and protect them from MITM attacks. Methods This research describes a proposed new method of improving DNP3 security by introducing BRC4 encryption. This combines Beaufort encryption, in which plain text is encrypted by applying a poly-alphabetic substitution code based on the Beaufort table by subtracting keys in plain text, and RC4 encryption, a stream cipher with a variable-length key algorithm. This research contributes to improving the security of data transmission and accelerating key generation. Results Tests are carried out by key space analysis, correlation coefficient analysis, information entropy analysis, visual analysis, and time complexity analysis.The results show that to secure encryption processes from brute force attacks, a key of at least 16 characters is necessary. IL data correlation values were IL1 = −0.010, IL2 = 0.006, and IL3 = 0.001, respectively, indicating that the proposed method (BRC4) is better than the Beaufort or RC4 methods in isolation. Meanwhile, the information entropy values from IL data are IL1 = 7.84, IL2 = 7.98, and IL3 = 7.99, respectively, likewise indicating that the proposed method is better than the Beaufort or RC4 methods in isolation. Both results also show that the proposed method is secure from MITM attacks. Visual analysis, using a histogram, shows that ciphertext is more significantly distributed than plaintext, and thus secure from MITM attacks. The time complexity analysis results show that the proposed method algorithm is categorized as linear complexity.