A SCADA testbed for investigating cyber security vulnerabilities in critical infrastructures

• Published in: Automatic control and computer sciences 2016, Vol.50 (1), p.54-62
• Main Authors: Tesfahun, Abebe, Bhaskari, D. Lalitha
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Computer Science; Control Structures and Microprogramming
• ISSN: 0146-4116; 1558-108X
• DOI: 10.3103/S0146411616010090

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are widely used in critical infrastructures such as water distribution networks, electricity generation and distribution plants, oil refineries, nuclear plants, and public transportation systems. However, the increased use of standard protocols and interconnectivity has exposed SCADA systems for potential cyber-attacks. In recent years, the cyber-security of SCADA systems has become a hot issue for governments, industrial sectors and academic community. Recently some security solutions have been proposed to secure SCADA systems. However, due to the critical nature of SCADA systems, evaluation of such proposed solutions on real system is im-practical. In this paper, we proposed an easily scalable and reconfigurable virtual SCADA security testbed, which can be used for developing and evaluating SCADA specific security solutions. With Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) and false data injection attack scenarios, we demonstrated how attackers could disrupt the normal operation of SCADA systems. Experimental results show that, the pro-posed testbed can be effectively used for cyber security assessment and vulner-ability investigation on SCADA systems. One of the outcomes of this work is a labeled dataset, which can be used by researchers in the area of SCADA security.