An Industrial Control System Physical Testbed for Naval Defense Cybersecurity Research

Abstract

Industrial Control Systems are used nowadays in many safety-critical applications, such as Naval Defense systems. These latter need high-level protection against cyberattacks, which can lead to potential disastrous consequences (e.g., components sabotage, Denial of Service, human deaths). Thus, these infrastructures, before being deployed in mission, need intensive security testing and validation. Moreover, cybersecurity research is required to anticipate future attacks. The research of new countermeasures has to be led on realistic platforms for getting precise and fruitful feedback for cyberdefense. This paper describes an Industrial Control System testbed for Naval Defense cybersecurity research. This realistic testbed implements a representative model of a warship, on which practical attacks and related countermeasures can be safely benchmarked. After describing the features of our physical testbed, we illustrate its relevance by describing four different attack scenarios. This testbed will be very useful in future works to elaborate and validate innovative cyberdefense measures (like knowledge-based and behavior-based intrusion detection) against network and physical process attacks, especially by generating representative datasets.