Securing Industrial Control Systems Using Physical Device Fingerprinting

The advent of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) has introduced new connectivity modalities, communication protocols, and optimized architectures to coordinate Things on a network. BACnet MS/TP is a protocol that has the potential to deliver a reliable IoT back-end for industrial systems. However, conventional security threats can severely affect trust between the nodes in the network, leading to critical infrastructure failures. Hence, we analyze the opportunities and challenges for hardware solutions in securing BACnet controllers in this work. First, we look into the security threats and develop practical attack models. Then, we demonstrate how we model clocks in the network for fingerprinting. Next, we propose a distributed security monitor for deployment across the BACnet MS/TP nodes. We also illustrate how clock fingerprinting data can enable the security monitor to prevent intrusion and tampering. Finally, we experimentally verify our attacker model, attack scenarios, and the effectiveness of hardware-oriented security solutions for intrusion prevention and tampering on an industrial standard BACnet MS/TP network.