RICS-el: Building a national testbed for research and training on SCADA security (short paper)

Abstract

Trends show that cyber attacks targeting critical infrastructures are increasing, but security research for protecting such systems are challenging. There is a gap between the somewhat simplified models researchers at universities can sustain contra the complex systems at infrastructure owners that seldom can be used for direct research. There is also a lack of common datasets for research benchmarking. This paper presents a national experimental testbed for security research within supervisory control and data acquisition systems (SCADA), accessible for both research training and experiments. The virtualized testbed has been designed and implemented with both vendor experts and security researchers to balance the goals of realism with specific research needs. It includes a real SCADA product for energy management, a number of network zones, substation nodes, and a simulated power system. This environment enables creation of scenarios similar to real world utility scenarios, attack generation, development of defence mechanisms, and perhaps just as important: generating open datasets for comparative research evaluation.