A Method for Revealing and Addressing Security Vulnerabilities in Cyber-physical Systems by Modeling Malicious Agent Interactions with Formal Verification

• Published in: Procedia computer science Vol. 95; pp. 24 - 31
• Main Authors: Wardell, Dean C., Mills, Robert F., Peterson, Gilbert L., Oxley, Mark E.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 2016
• Subjects: industrial control systems; malicious agents; model checking; vulnerability detection; industrial control systems; model checking; vulnerability detection; malicious agents
• ISSN: 1877-0509; 1877-0509
• DOI: 10.1016/j.procs.2016.09.289

Several cyber-attacks on the cyber-physical systems (CPS) that monitor and control critical infrastructure were publically announced over the last few years. Almost without exception, the proposed security solutions focus on preventing unauthorized access to the industrial control systems (ICS) at various levels – the defense in depth approach. While useful, it does not address the problem of making the systems more capable of responding to the malicious actions of an attacker once they have gained access to the system. The first step in making an ICS more resilient to an attacker is identifying the cyber security vulnerabilities the attacker can use during system design. This paper presents a method that reveals cyber security vulnerabilities in ICS through the formal modeling of the system and malicious agents. The inclusion of the malicious agent in the analysis of an existing systems identifies security vulnerabilities that are missed in traditional functional model checking.