A Low-Latency, High-Integrity Security Retrofit for Legacy SCADA Systems

ABSTRACT:

We construct a bump-in-the-wire (BITW) solution that retrofits security into time-critical communications over bandwidth-limited serial links between devices in Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. Previous BITW solutions fail to provide the necessary security within timing constraints; the previous solution that does provide the necessary security is not BITW. At a comparable hardware cost, our BITW solution provides sufficient security, and yet incurs minimal end-to-end communication latency. A microcontroller prototype of our solution is under development.

INTRODUCTION

1.1 SCADA Systems

Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are real-time process control systems that monitor and control local or geographically remote devices. They are widely used in modern industrial facilities and critical infrastructures, such as electric power generation and distribution systems, oil and gas refineries and transportation systems, allowing operators to ensure the proper functioning of these facilities and infrastructures.

Electric power utilities, for instance, were among the first to widely adopt remote monitoring and control systems. Their earliest SCADA systems provided simple monitoring through periodic sampling of analog data, but have evolved into more complex communication networks. In this pa- per, we focus on securing SCADA systems for electric power generation and distribution. However, our discussions and proposed solution are applicable to many other SCADA systems.

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Patrick P. Tsang† and Sean W. Smith‡

Department of Computer Science Dartmouth College NH 03755 USA

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Towards Benchmarking of P2P Technologies from a SCADA Systems Protection Perspective

ABSTRACT:

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are used to control and monitor critical processes. Modern SCADA systems are increasingly built with off-the-shelf components simplifying their integra- tion into existing networks. The benefits of increased flexibility and reduced costs are accompanied by newly introduced challenges regarding SCADA security/dependability. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technologies allow for the con- struction of self-organizing, dependable and large-scale overlays on top of existing physical networks.

In this paper, we build the base for using P2P to enhance the resilience of deployed SCADA systems. To this end, we provide a general analysis of both domains and their compatibility. In addition, we refine the existing classi- fications of P2P technologies w.r.t. the needs and capabilities of SCADA systems. Consequently, we identify core P2P-based protection mechanisms for SCADA systems, based on data and path replication. Our main results are generic guidelines for the exploitation of P2P technologies to enhance the SCADA resilience.

Key words: SCADA, Critical Infrastructure Protection, P2P, Dependabil- ity, Security

INTRODUCTION

For life in modern-day societies the dependability of Critical Infrastructures (CI), e.g., power grid or water supply, is of essential character. Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are embedded in these CI for the purpose of monitoring and controlling them. While the first SCADA systems were built using proprietary standards and dedicated hardware in closed architectures, the trend is towards more flexible systems and open protocols like the Internet Protocol (IP). IP-enabled SCADA components allow usage of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products and integration into existing network structures, e.g., corporate LAN or WAN like the Internet, thus saving costs of specialized hard-/software and allow- ing faster adaption to changing requirements. At the same time, this technological shift towards a networked system, eventually even connected to the Internet, intro- duces new threats and vulnerabilities to SCADA systems and since the disputed concept security through obscurity is no longer applicable, previously unnoticed or ignored security issues might now be exposed. To handle these security challenges, techniques from conventional networked systems can be transferred to the SCADA domain.

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Abdelmajid Khelil, Sebastian Jeckel, Daniel Germanus, Neeraj Suri⋆

Technische Universita ̈t Darmstadt, Hochschulstr. 10, 64289 Darmstadt, Germany Tel. +49 6151 16{3414—3711—5321—3513}, Fax. +49 6151 16 4310 {khelil,jeckel,germanus,suri}@cs.tu-darmstadt.de

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SCADA SYSTEM TRENDS IN DEEPWATER DEVELOPMENTS

ABSTRACT

Subsea systems used in combination with host facilities, such as floating, production storage and offloading units (FPSOs), tension leg platforms (TLPs), spars or compliant towers employ supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems whose architectures differ from SCADA systems found on conventional platforms. In these systems, programmable logic controllers (PLCs) located on the host facility, provide control of subsea valves on manifolds and satellite wells. PLCs also continuously record data from temperature and pressure sensors located on subsea wells. Since it is expensive to repair the electronic systems on the manifolds and satellite wells, redundancy is typically built into the system.

SCADA systems used in deepwater must also provide for control switching to workover vessels. Such vessels must provide control compatible with the existing deepwater multiplex controls and must ensure the safe control of the well.

During 1999, the Minerals Management Service (MMS) in the United States launched a study to assess the current state of SCADA systems used in the territorial waters of the US, with special emphasis on quantifying the reliability of these systems.

This paper describes findings from this study and provides a comparison of trends with other international deepwater SCADA systems.

INTRODUCTION

Deepwater developments have progressed from fixed structures in waters of less than 1400 feet to developments that include an array of structures (FPSO, TLP, Spar) in water depths of 4000 feet or more.

At the same time, subsea well technology has become sufficiently advanced to allow wells to be completed on the seafloor in over 5000 feet of water. Multiplex electro-hydraulic control (MUX) systems interface these subsea wells with the host platform and provide the ability to close valves, sample well pressures and temperatures, test well flow, run shut-in pressure surveys and to control well treatments.

SCADA systems have also evolved from discrete stand-alone systems, to systems integrating a multitude of input and output points through the use of PLCs and PC-based controllers. These modern SCADA systems provide the capability to continuously monitor subsea wells, poll the wells for status of operation, sample and return data on a continuous basis, and provide emergency shut-down controls.

The United States MMS recognized these trends, and the proliferation of SCADA systems being used offshore. In 1999, the MMS initiated a study to determine the state of SCADA systems used offshore and the reliability of these systems. This work identified different SCADA architectures for fixed structures, deepwater developments, pipelines and mobile drilling units. The results reported here focus on deepwater SCADA systems.

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Shari Dunn-Norman1, Kelvin.T. Erickson 2, Egemen K. Cetinkaya3 E. Keith Stanek4 and Ann Miller5

Copyright 2000, Brazilian Petroleum Institute - IBP

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Robotic Mapping: A Survey

ABSTRACT

This article provides a comprehensive introduction into the field of robotic mapping, with a focus on indoor mapping. It describes and compares various probabilistic techniques, as they are presently being applied to a vast array of mobile robot mapping problems. The history of robotic mapping is also described, along with an extensive list of open research problems.

Keywords: Bayes filters, robotic mapping, exploration, expectation maximization algorithm, Kalman filters, mobile robots

INTRODUCTION

Robotic mapping has been a highly active research area in robotics and AI for at least two decades. Robotic mapping addresses the problem of acquiring spatial models of physical environments through mobile robots. The mapping problem is generally regarded as one of the most important problems in the pursuit of building truly autonomous mobile robots. Despite significant progress in this area, it still poses great challenges. At present, we have robust methods for mapping environments that are static, structured, and of limited size. Mapping unstructured, dynamic, or large-scale environments remains largely an open research problem.

This article attempts to provide a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in robotic mapping, with a focus on indoor environments. Virtually all state-of-the-art robotic mapping algorithms are probabilistic. Some algorithms are incremental, and hence can be run in real time, whereas others require multiple passes through the data. Some algorithms require exact pose information to build a map, whereas others can do so using odometry measurements. Some algorithms are equipped to handle correspondence problems between data recorded at different points in time, whereas others require features to carry signatures that makes them uniquely identifiable.

When writing this article, we tried to keep the level of mathematics at a minimum, focusing instead on the intuition behind the different techniques. However, some mathematical notation was deemed necessary to communicate the basic concepts in a crisp way. The serious reader is invited to read some of the articles referenced in this paper, which discuss many of the ideas presented here in more depth.

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Sebastian Thrun February 2002 CMU-CS-02-111

School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213

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Wireless sensor networks: a survey

ABSTRACT

This paper describes the concept of sensor networks which has been made viable by the convergence of micro- electro-mechanical systems technology, wireless communications and digital electronics. First, the sensing tasks and the potential sensor networks applications are explored, and a review of factors influencing the design of sensor networks is provided. Then, the communication architecture for sensor networks is outlined, and the algorithms and protocols developed for each layer in the literature are explored. Open research issues for the realization of sensor networks are also discussed. Ó 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.

Keywords: Wireless sensor networks; Ad hoc networks; Application layer; Transport layer; Networking layer; Routing; Data link layer; Medium access control; Error control; Physical layer; Power aware protocols

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I.F. Akyildiz, W. Su*, Y. Sankarasubramaniam, E. Cayirci

Broadband and Wireless Networking Laboratory, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA

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Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

ABSTRACT

A mobile ad hoc network is a relatively new term for an old technology - a network that does not rely on pre-existing infrastructure. Roots of this technology could be traced back to the early 1970s with the DARPA PRNet and the SURAN projects. The new twitch is the application of this technology in the non-military communication environments. Additionally, the research community has also recently addressed some extended features of this technology, such as multicasting and security. Also numerous new solutions to the "old" problems of routing and medium access control have been proposed. This survey attempts to summarize the state-ofthe -art of the ad hoc networking technology in four areas: routing, medium access control, multicasting, and security. Where possible, comparison between the proposed protocols is also discussed.

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Zygmunt J. Haas, Jing Deng, Ben Liang, Panagiotis Papadimitratos, and S. Sajama Cornell University School of Electrical and Computer Engineering 323 Rhodes Hall Ithaca, NY 14853 Tel: (607) 255-3454, Fax: (607) 255-9072 e-mail: {haas, jing, liang, papadp, sajama}@ece.cornell.edu URL: http://www.ece.cornell.edu/~haas/wnl/html

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PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF LOCAL DESCRIPTORS (2005)

Abstract:

In this paper we compare the performance of descriptors computed for local interest regions, as for example extracted by the Harris-Affine detector [32]. Many different descriptors have been proposed in the literature. However, it is unclear which descriptors are more appropriate and how their performance depends on the interest region detector. The descriptors should be distinctive and at the same time robust to changes in viewing conditions as well as to errors of the detector. Our evaluation uses as criterion recall with respect to precision and is carried out for different image transformations. We compare shape context [3], steerable filters [12], PCA-SIFT [19], differential invariants [20], spin images [21], SIFT [26], complex filters [37], moment invariants [43], and cross-correlation for different types of interest regions. We also propose an extension of the SIFT descriptor, and show that it outperforms the original method. Furthermore, we observe that the ranking of the descriptors is mostly independent of the interest region detector and that the SIFT based descriptors perform best. Moments and steerable filters show the best performance among the low dimensional descriptors.

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Krystian Mikolajczyk and Cordelia Schmid

Dept. of Engineering Science University of Oxford Oxford, OX1 3PJ United Kingdom

INRIA Rhoˆne-Alpes 655, av. de l’Europe 38330 Montbonnot France

km@robots.ox.ac.uk schmid@inrialpes.fr


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Education and the Semantic Web

Abstract. Recent developments in Web technologies and using AI techniques to support efforts in making the Web more intelligent and provide higher-level services to its users have opened the door to building the Semantic Web. That fact has a number of important implications for Web-based education, since Web-based education has become a very important branch of educational technology. Classroom independence and platform independence of Web-based education, availability of authoring tools for developing Web-based courseware, cheap and efficient storage and distribution of course materials, hyperlinks to suggested readings, digital libraries, and other sources of references relevant for the course are but a few of a number of clear advantages of Web-based education. However, there are several challenges in improving Web-based education, such as providing for more adaptivity and intelligence. Developments in the Semantic Web, while contributing to the solution to these problems, also raise new issues that must be considered if we are to progress. This paper surveys the basics of the Semantic Web and discusses its importance in future Web-based educational applications.

INTRODUCTION

One of the hottest R&D topics in recent years in the AI community, as well as in the Internet community, is the Semantic Web. It is about making the Web more understandable by machines (Heflin & Hendler, 2001). It is also about building an appropriate infrastructure for intelligent agents to run around the Web performing complex actions for their users (Hendler, 2001). In order to do that, agents must retrieve and manipulate pertinent information, which requires seamless agent integration with the Web and taking full advantage of the existing infrastructure (such as message sending, security, authentication, directory services, and application service frameworks) (Scott Cost et al., 2002). Furthermore, Semantic Web is about explicitly declaring the knowledge embedded in many Web-based applications, integrating information in an intelligent way, providing semantic-based access to the Internet, and extracting information from texts (Gómez-Pérez & Corcho, 2002).

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Vladan Devedzic, Department of Information Systems and Technologies, FON – School of Business Administration, University of Belgrade, POB 52, Jove Ilica 154, 11000 Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro devedzic@galeb.etf.bg.ac.yu

http://galeb.etf.bg.ac.yu/~devedzic/

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WRAPPING A MOBILE ROBOT WITH RT-CORBA

ABSTRAC

Building complex controllers is a major challenge and it is widely accepted that object technology can help with the problem. This is of special relevance in the field of complex robot control, in particular when distribution is necessary. CORBA is a suitable technology for deployment and is well demon- strated in the experimental field and in commercial robots. In this paper we describe the implementation of a real-time object wrapper for a mobile robot using Real-time CORBA technology. This type of wrapping enables the implementation of networked robot control systems with increased degrees of predictability.

Keywords: Robot control software, distributed control, object wrappers, CORBA, Real-time CORBA.

INTRODUCTION

The nature of applied research in intelligent robot controllers makes having a versatile soft- ware architecture a real need for exploring al- ternative designs in robotic mind construction. Flexibility, modularity, maintainability and even hot-replaceability of components are major non- functional needs for such systems. While some effort has been spent on genericity is robot control system construction, most research has been cen- tered around the provision of ultimate architec- tures and reusable software components to fulfill specific missions in the robot controller. Less effort has been put, however, in the development of a robust and flexible underlying software platform where to explore such designs and components.

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Ricardo Sanz∗,1 Adolfo Hernando∗ Carlos Mart ́ınez∗ Ignacio L ́opez∗

∗ Autonomous Systems Laboratory Universidad Polit ́ecnica de Madrid, Spain

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NEW EXCITING IDEAS IN OLD AREAS

ABSTRACT

In recent years there has been a of lot glamour associated with new areas of research and teaching within the mechanical design community. This should be all for the good. However, there is a danger that instead of simply adding new areas, this gives the idea that older areas are no longer of much interest. Recently, four problems that I have dealt with for a long time have been viewed in new ways, and this has brought forth new and exciting ideas. This paper outlines these problems and the new solution methods. The problems are in the subject areas of robot design, robot control, linkage kinematics and design education. The main idea of this paper is to show that older, more traditional areas, when viewed in new ways, can lead to exciting new avenues of research, application and teaching.

INTRODUCTION

Recently, four problems that I have dealt with for a long time have been viewed in new ways, and this has brought forth new and exciting ideas. This paper briefly discusses each of these new solutions and indicates the potential that the new solutions bring into play. The problems are in the subject areas of robot design, robot control, linkage kinematics and design education. This paper is divided in to four sections where each of these problems is treated in turn.

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Bernard Roth Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

http://nacomm03.ammindia.org/Articles/Key001.pdf