A Meta Model for a Comprehensive Description of Network Protocols Improving Security Tests

Abstract

Modern industrial automation and control systems (IACS) are highly interconnected via Ethernet. Performing security tests to detect possible vulnerabilities in IACS is one of the measures requested by the IEC 62443 series of standards in order to improve their security. However, security testing tools and frameworks which exceed the power of random fuzzing require precise network protocol definitions. Unfortunately, those definitions vary greatly from tool to tool. Additionally, their creation and maintenance is time-consuming and error-prone. In consequence, especially common IACS protocols like Profinet IO or OPC UA are seldom to never implemented. To overcome this issue, this work proposes and implements an approach of a generic meta model for a comprehensive description of arbitrary network protocols. An important use case of this meta model is the export of network protocol definitions for different testing tools.