Investigation of Cyber Attacks on a Water Distribution System

Abstract

A Cyber Physical System (CPS) consists of cyber components for computation and communication, and physical components such as sensors and actuators for process control. These components are networked and interact in a feedback loop. CPS are found in critical infrastructure such as water distribution, power grid, and mass transportation. Often these systems are vulnerable to attacks as the cyber components such as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition workstations, Human Machine Interface and Programmable Logic Controllers are potential targets for attackers. In this work, we report a study to investigate the impact of cyber attacks on a water distribution (WADI) system. Attacks were designed to meet attacker objectives and launched on WADI using a specially designed tool. This tool enables the launch of single and multi-point attacks where the latter are designed to specifically hide one or more attacks. The outcome of the experiments led to a better understanding of attack propagation and behavior of WADI in response to the attacks as well as to the design of an attack detection mechanism for water distribution system.

Defending Water Treatment Networks: Exploiting Spatio-Temporal Effects for Cyber Attack Detection

“…There are many existing studies about outlier detection in water treatment networks [2], [4], [5], [35], [36]. For instance, Adepu et al studied the impact of cyber attacks on water distribution systems [37]. Goh et al designed an unsupervised learning approach that regards Recurrent Neural Networks as a temporal predictor to detect attacks [1].…”

Automating Security Risk and Requirements Management for Cyber-Physical Systems

“…The individual risk to each security goal is calculated from the probability and impact values, as described in Section 4.5, and shown in Table 7. 6. The capable but unattractive risks are considered to be low since there is always the possibility that an attacker might inadvertently execute even unattractive threats.…”

“…The risks, previously shown in Table 7. 6, implicitly indicate the need for proper mitigation at an abstract level, such as the integrity of ESP−RB must be protected due to a high risk. To refine these abstract requirements in an actionable way, security controls from a catalog are recommended and presented in Table 7.…”

“…One of the biggest threats to previously secure systems are changes in infrastructure, processes, and dependencies that affect security needs. Attacks on vehicles [1,2,3], industrial sites [4,5], and critical infrastructures like water plants [6] and power grids [7] demonstrate the need for secure CPSs to prevent harm and losses. Most of these incidents were caused by insecure protocols and a lack of access control mechanisms that were not considered during the development of the attacked systems.…”