Towards Industrial Intrusion Prevention Systems: A Concept and Implementation for Reactive Protection

Abstract

Featured Application: The paper presents a concept to actively and automatically respond to security intrusions in Industrial Automation Systems. It is comprised of reactive actions, and security and operational policies that consider both security and architectural trends of this kind of systems. This concept is of significance to system stakeholders that wish to increase the security of their system by implementing automatic and active protection.Abstract: System intrusions violate the security of a system. In order to maintain it, it is necessary to decrease the chances of intrusions occurring or by detecting them as soon as they ensue in order to respond to them in a timely manner. These responses are divided in two types: passive or reactive responses. Passive responses are limited to only notification and alerting; whereas, reactive responses influence the intrusion by undoing or diminishing its consequences. Unfortunately, some reactive responses may influence the underlying system where the intrusion has occurred. This is especially a concern in the field of Industrial Automation Systems, as these systems are critical and have a well-defined set of operational requirements that must be maintained. Hence, automatic reactive responses are often not considered or are limited to human intervention. This paper addresses this issue by introducing a concept for reactive protection that integrates the automatic execution of active responses that do not influence the operation of the underlying Industrial Automation System. This concept takes into consideration architectural and security trends, as well as security and operational policies of Industrial Automation Systems. It also proposes a set of reactive actions that can be taken in the presence of intrusions in order to counteract them or diminish their effects. The feasibility and applicability of the presented concept for Industrial Automation Systems is supported by the implementation and evaluation of a prototypical Reactive Protection System.

An Indicators-of-Risk Library for Industrial Network Security

“…For the second validation IoRs were cross-checked against experimental ICS security detection use cases from three sources: The NIST IR8219 [20] identifies a total of 53 ICS behavioural anomaly detection use cases using four different tools; [28] lists 15 example events corresponding to violation of security policies in ICS; and the third is a report on a PoC performed in a manufacturing company in 2019. Table 3 lists the IoRs that match the observable events from these sources, indicating the tools used and the number of detection use cases or anomaly event types reviewed.…”