Team for Research in
Ubiquitous Secure Technology

Citation
Saurabh Amin. "Stealthy Deception Attacks on Water SCADA Systems". Talk or presentation, 29, November, 2009.

Abstract
Dynamics of water flow networks, such as irrigation canal systems, can be modeled by differential equations evolving on graphs. Water flow networks are monitored and controlled at boundary nodes by supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. Recently, there have been significant developments in the suite of automatic control methods for water SCADA systems such that a user specified performance criteria as well as certain robustness guarantees are achieved in closed-loop. Water SCADA systems often use commodity information technology (IT) solutions and are now being made accessible to remote users via corporate networks and the Internet. Thus, they inherit many of known IT vulnerabilities and threats. Indeed, recent incidents have confirmed that cyber-attacks on water SCADA systems have become a more attractive choice for the attackers in comparison to physical attacks; they are cheaper, less risky, and are becoming easier to execute. We believe that in order to increase the resilience of SCADA systems under attacks, a system theoretic characterization of cyber-attacks is needed. Motivated by this challenge, we will discuss stealthy deception attacks on a typical water SCADA system managing an irrigation canal network. We study scenarios in which an adversary—with financial or malicious intent—can carry out deception attacks on certain sensor and control processes. In particular, we focus on analysis of stealthy deception attacks in which the adversary degrades the intended purpose of commonly used proportional (P) or proportional-integral (PI) controllers by compromising certain sensor measurements and/or control actions. We use the theory of switching dynamical systems to model adversary's actions and show that due to the slow and distributed nature of these systems, detection of these attacks can be difficult for the SCADA system. We illustrate a deception attack scenario implemented on a real SCADA system that manages the Gignac canal in France.

Electronic downloads

• 6%20-%20Amin.pdf · application/pdf · 2801 kbytes

• HTML

  Saurabh Amin. <a
  href="http://www.truststc.org/pubs/636.html"
  ><i>Stealthy Deception Attacks on Water SCADA
  Systems</i></a>, Talk or presentation,  29,
  November, 2009.

• Plain text

  Saurabh Amin. "Stealthy Deception Attacks on Water
  SCADA Systems". Talk or presentation,  29, November,
  2009.

• BibTeX

  @presentation{Amin09_StealthyDeceptionAttacksOnWaterSCADASystems,
      author = {Saurabh Amin},
      title = {Stealthy Deception Attacks on Water SCADA Systems},
      day = {29},
      month = {November},
      year = {2009},
      abstract = {Dynamics of water flow networks, such as
                irrigation canal systems, can be modeled by
                differential equations evolving on graphs. Water
                flow networks are monitored and controlled at
                boundary nodes by supervisory control and data
                acquisition (SCADA) systems. Recently, there have
                been significant developments in the suite of
                automatic control methods for water SCADA systems
                such that a user specified performance criteria as
                well as certain robustness guarantees are achieved
                in closed-loop. Water SCADA systems often use
                commodity information technology (IT) solutions
                and are now being made accessible to remote users
                via corporate networks and the Internet. Thus,
                they inherit many of known IT vulnerabilities and
                threats. Indeed, recent incidents have confirmed
                that cyber-attacks on water SCADA systems have
                become a more attractive choice for the attackers
                in comparison to physical attacks; they are
                cheaper, less risky, and are becoming easier to
                execute. We believe that in order to increase the
                resilience of SCADA systems under attacks, a
                system theoretic characterization of cyber-attacks
                is needed. Motivated by this challenge, we will
                discuss stealthy deception attacks on a typical
                water SCADA system managing an irrigation canal
                network. We study scenarios in which an
                adversary—with financial or malicious
                intent—can carry out deception attacks on
                certain sensor and control processes. In
                particular, we focus on analysis of stealthy
                deception attacks in which the adversary degrades
                the intended purpose of commonly used proportional
                (P) or proportional-integral (PI) controllers by
                compromising certain sensor measurements and/or
                control actions. We use the theory of switching
                dynamical systems to model adversary's actions and
                show that due to the slow and distributed nature
                of these systems, detection of these attacks can
                be difficult for the SCADA system. We illustrate a
                deception attack scenario implemented on a real
                SCADA system that manages the Gignac canal in
                France.},
      URL = {http://www.truststc.org/pubs/636.html}
  }
  

Posted by Larry Rohrbough on 5 Nov 2009.
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