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- ItemPowerDuck: A GOOSE Data Set of Cyberattacks in Substations(New York City : ACM, 2022-08-08) Zemanek, Sven; Hacker, Immanuel; Wolsing, Konrad; Wagner, Eric; Henze, Martin; Serror, MartinPower grids worldwide are increasingly victims of cyberattacks, where attackers can cause immense damage to critical infrastructure. The growing digitalization and networking in power grids combined with insufficient protection against cyberattacks further exacerbate this trend. Hence, security engineers and researchers must counter these new risks by continuously improving security measures. Data sets of real network traffic during cyberattacks play a decisive role in analyzing and understanding such attacks. Therefore, this paper presents PowerDuck, a publicly available security data set containing network traces of GOOSE communication in a physical substation testbed. The data set includes recordings of various scenarios with and without the presence of attacks. Furthermore, all network packets originating from the attacker are clearly labeled to facilitate their identification. We thus envision PowerDuck improving and complementing existing data sets of substations, which are often generated synthetically, thus enhancing the security of power grids.
- ItemIPAL: Breaking up Silos of Protocol-dependent and Domain-specific Industrial Intrusion Detection Systems(New York City : Association for Computing Machinery, 2022-10-26) Wolsing, Konrad; Wagner, Eric; Saillard, Antoine; Henze, MartinThe increasing interconnection of industrial networks exposes them to an ever-growing risk of cyber attacks. To reveal such attacks early and prevent any damage, industrial intrusion detection searches for anomalies in otherwise predictable communication or process behavior. However, current efforts mostly focus on specific domains and protocols, leading to a research landscape broken up into isolated silos. Thus, existing approaches cannot be applied to other industries that would equally benefit from powerful detection. To better understand this issue, we survey 53 detection systems and find no fundamental reason for their narrow focus. Although they are often coupled to specific industrial protocols in practice, many approaches could generalize to new industrial scenarios in theory. To unlock this potential, we propose IPAL, our industrial protocol abstraction layer, to decouple intrusion detection from domain-specific industrial protocols. After proving IPAL's correctness in a reproducibility study of related work, we showcase its unique benefits by studying the generalizability of existing approaches to new datasets and conclude that they are indeed not restricted to specific domains or protocols and can perform outside their restricted silos.
- ItemOn specification-based cyber-attack detection in smart grids(2022) Sen, Ömer; van der Velde, Dennis; Lühman, Maik; Sprünken, Florian; Hacker, Immanuel; Ulbig, Andreas; Andres, Michael; Henze, MartinThe transformation of power grids into intelligent cyber-physical systems brings numerous benefits, but also significantly increases the surface for cyber-attacks, demanding appropriate countermeasures. However, the development, validation, and testing of data-driven countermeasures against cyber-attacks, such as machine learning-based detection approaches, lack important data from real-world cyber incidents. Unlike attack data from real-world cyber incidents, infrastructure knowledge and standards are accessible through expert and domain knowledge. Our proposed approach uses domain knowledge to define the behavior of a smart grid under non-attack conditions and detect attack patterns and anomalies. Using a graph-based specification formalism, we combine cross-domain knowledge that enables the generation of whitelisting rules not only for statically defined protocol fields but also for communication flows and technical operation boundaries. Finally, we evaluate our specification-based intrusion detection system against various attack scenarios and assess detection quality and performance. In particular, we investigate a data manipulation attack in a future-orientated use case of an IEC 60870-based SCADA system that controls distributed energy resources in the distribution grid. Our approach can detect severe data manipulation attacks with high accuracy in a timely and reliable manner.
- ItemCybersecurity in Power Grids: Challenges and Opportunities(2021) Krause, Tim; Ernst, Raphael; Klaer, Benedikt; Hacker, Immanuel; Henze, MartinIncreasing volatilities within power transmission and distribution force power grid operators to amplify their use of communication infrastructure to monitor and control their grid. The resulting increase in communication creates a larger attack surface for malicious actors. Indeed, cyber attacks on power grids have already succeeded in causing temporary, large-scale blackouts in the recent past. In this paper, we analyze the communication infrastructure of power grids to derive resulting fundamental challenges of power grids with respect to cybersecurity. Based on these challenges, we identify a broad set of resulting attack vectors and attack scenarios that threaten the security of power grids. To address these challenges, we propose to rely on a defense-in-depth strategy, which encompasses measures for (i) device and application security, (ii) network security, and (iii) physical security, as well as (iv) policies, procedures, and awareness. For each of these categories, we distill and discuss a comprehensive set of state-of-the art approaches, as well as identify further opportunities to strengthen cybersecurity in interconnected power grids.