What is it about?
Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are found in critical infrastructures such as water treatment plants, water distribution systems, and the electric power grid. With the increasing integration of modern information and communication technology, ICS systems are vulnerable to cyber and physical attacks. In this study, an operational water distribution plant was used to study how an attacker can steal water and remain undetected by launching a series of replay attacks on the system.
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Why is it important?
Due to the complex nature of water distribution systems, they are vulnerable to physical attacks such as leaks and contamination, etc. A leak can be an intentional attack in which an attacker can steal water from the system. While doing so, he wants to remain undetected from such attacks by compromising a subset of sensors and alter their measurements. The choice of sensors and actuators also depends on the knowledge and capabilities of an attacker. We launch replay attacks on sensors such as pressure and flow meters. We investigated different attacker models and determine whether an attacker is successful in remaining undetected against the statistical attack detection model.
Perspectives
It was a great pleasure working with coauthors as this study brings lots of challenges when launching different kind of attacks simultaneously on a system.
Venkata Reddy Palleti
It gave us some fresh perspective on executing well-known replay attacks on a realistic water treatment system. It was interesting to see how difficult it is to carry out a replay attack on a real-world physical process. The insights are valuable for threat modeling for critical industrial control systems.
Chuadhry Mujeeb Ahmed
Singapore University of Technology and Design
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Can Replay Attacks Designed to Steal Water from Water Distribution Systems Remain Undetected?, ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems, January 2021, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3406764.
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