Towards a modular security testing framework for industrial automation and control systems: ISuTest

Abstract

Industrial automation and control systems (IACS) play a key role in modern production facilities. On the one hand, they provide real-time functionality to the connected field devices. On the other hand, they get more and more connected to local networks and the internet in order to facilitate use cases promoted by "Industry 4.0". This makes IACS susceptible to cyber-attacks which exploit vulnerabilities, for example in order to interrupt the automation process. Security testing targets at discovering those vulnerabilities before they are exploited. In order to enable IACS manufacturers and integrators to perform security testing for their devices, we present ISuTest, a modular security testing framework for IACS. ISuTest is designed to be extendable regarding all kinds of automation protocols, different connection paths as well as evaluating arbitrary outputs of the tested devices. This paper describes the fundamental ideas behind ISuTest, its design and a basic evaluation in which the ISuTest framework was able to discover a vulnerability in a programmable logic controller (PLC). The paper concludes with a broad overview of the planned future work.

Smarter Evolution: Enhancing Evolutionary Black Box Fuzzing with Adaptive Models

“…In particular, this allows for thorough tests, even if information on internal parts of the components is not accessible. We call our approach Smevolution and implement it based on the security testing framework ISuTest ® [6]. We evaluate Smevolution by running different fuzzer configurations against a SUT with artificial vulnerabilities.…”

“…On the one hand, we use a random fuzzer that performs the selection at random and uses the default mutation strategy provided by ISuTest ® . This mutation strategy is based on fixed heuristics crafted for black box network fuzzing [6]. We will refer to this random fuzzer as A_RANDOM in the following.…”

“…Note that the goal of our work is to analyze whether the models are able to learn meaningful information and use such fuzzers that are less sophisticated as a baseline. Nevertheless, these baseline fuzzers are based upon mutation heuristics especially developed for the use in black box network fuzzing for ICS [6]. For future work, it would be interesting to compare Smevolution to additional state-of-the-art black box fuzzers for network protocols to analyze their general performance.…”

“…ISuTest ® is a framework for security tests against networked devices, which focuses on black box fuzzing via Ethernet [ 6 ]. It enables users to detect formerly unknown vulnerabilities in ICs.…”

Qualitative Analysis for Validating IEC 62443-4-2 Requirements in DevSecOps

“…They conclude that none of the investigated tools completely answers industrial systems specificity and propose a new one fulfilling the requirements that they have identified for an ideal IACS fuzzer. The proposed fuzzer is integrated into the ISuTest security testing framework for IACS that was developed by the authors [13] to meet these requirements. This work resembles our approach in that it aims at supporting the security testing of IACS.…”