SCADA
SCADA
by Sidney C Smith
Disclaimers
The findings in this report are not to be construed as an official Department of the Army position
unless so designated by other authorized documents.
Citation of manufacturer’s or trade names does not constitute an official endorsement or approval
of the use thereof.
Destroy this report when it is no longer needed. Do not return it to the originator.
Army Research Laboratory
Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD 21005-5067
Sidney C Smith
Computational and Informational Sciences Directorate, ARL
14. ABSTRACT
That Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are critical to the infrastructure of modern society
and vulnerable to various attacks has been understood for several years. This report provides a brief overview of the
technologies that compose SCADA systems, the impacts when SCADA systems fail, a high-level overview of the
vulnerabilities present in SCADA systems, and a review of efforts that have been made to mitigate these
vulnerabilities to include configuration guides, vulnerability assessments, network intrusion detection,
cryptography, and test beds.
ii
Contents
List of Figures iv
1. Introduction 1
2. SCADA Architecture 1
4. SCADA Vulnerabilities 4
5. SCADA Countermeasures 5
5.4 Cryptography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
6. Conclusions 9
7. References 10
Distribution List 14
iii
List of Figures
iv
I NTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK .
v
1. Introduction
Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems collect information from
sensors and actuators about some physical environment and provide an operator
interface which allows control and reporting. The physical environment could be a
power plant, power-distribution network, water-treatment plant, manufacturing floor,
petroleum refinery, or any other physical environment that requires control and data
acquisition. As early as 1999 the European Organization for Nuclear Research was
looking into using a SCADA system to control a laboratory environment.1 As late as
2009 Aydogmus and Aydogmus discussed the use of a SCADA system to allow students
to remotely interact with a laboratory supporting distance learning.2 The data acquired
may be operationally oriented and used to better run the system, or it could be strategic
in nature and used to better run the company.
SCADA systems play a critical role in the foundation of modern society, and there is a
large body of work dedicated to defending these systems from cyber attack. The purpose
of this report is to survey and summerize that work. In Section 2, this report reviews the
basic components of a SCADA architecture. In Section 3, it reviews the impacts of some
famous failures in SCADA systems. In Section 4, this report discusses the shared and
unique vulnerabilities of SCADA systems. In Section 5, it reviews the countermeasures
that are currently in place to protect SCADA systems. In Section 6, the report provides
some concluding insight into the current research being done to defend SCADA systems.
2. SCADA Architecture
Technically the SCADA system is composed of the information technology (IT) that
provides the human-machine interface (HMI) and stores and analyzes the data. It may
contain the logic necessary to operate the physical environment either autonomously or
semi-autonomously. Although technically not part of the SCADA system, SCADA
systems are connected to the sensors and actuators via a complex network of devices
that include Front End Processors (FEPs), Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs), Master
Terminal Units (MTUs), Motor Control Centers (MCCs), Programmable Logic
Controllers (PLCs), and Remote Terminal Units (RTUs). FEPs provide a gateway from
1
Figure An example of SCADA architecture (illustration by the US DoE3 )
the often proprietary protocols and media used by the sensor network to the general
purpose computer system that runs the SCADA system. IEDs are very small, dedicated
computer systems that directly connect to and control sensors and actuators. MTUs
connect to multiple RTUs, consolidating the control and data traffic from the RTUs to the
SCADA system. MCCs are dedicated computer systems that control the performance of
an electric motor. PLCs provide a more direct interface between the sensor or actuator to
the SCADA system encompassing the functionality of the IED and RTU into one device.
An RTU connects to one or more IEDs and consolidates their data collection and control
providing a gateway between the IED and the SCADA system or MTU.
The figure illustrates a typical SCADA architecture. Notice that the IEDs and PLCs
connect directly to the sensors and actuators which are not shown in this diagram. The
IEDs are connected to RTUs or an FEP, called a port server/comm processor in the
diagram. These are then connected to the SCADA system which consists of a
communications server, historian, and application server and services several
workstations running the HMI.
2
trend has been to move from the UNIX/RISC system to commodity hardware and
Microsoft solutions although there is some Linux,1 to move from dedicated serial lines to
Ethernet and even Wireless technologies, to move from proprietary protocols to
standard protocols, and to connect these systems to the corporate network.9 The
proprietary HMIs have given way to Web-based applications. The requirement to share
this information with customers and partners has spawned the implementation of
Web-service-based applications. These migrations have greatly reduced the cost and
increased the reliability and functionality of SCADA systems; however, they have also
dramatically increased the risks inherent in them.
SCADA systems control segments of the infrastructure critical to the smooth function of
our society. These segments include the production and distribution of electricity, the
distribution of water, the treatment of sewage, the refinement and distribution of
petroleum—just to name a few.10
Fernandez and Fernandez11 provide the following survey of the impact of SCADA
failures that lead to 4 major blackouts in 2003:
Outage 1: On August 25, 2003, more than 100 electric plants were shut
down, including 22 nuclear power plants, affecting 50 million people in the
U.S. and Canada. This was the biggest blackout in North American history,
forcing the closure of 10 major airports, causing the cancellation of 700 flights,
and leaving 350,000 people stranded on the New York City subway. A broken
alarm at First Energy, a northern Ohio utility company, may have allowed too
much to go wrong before technicians noticed the problem. The reversal of
power happened so fast that operators did not have time to react, and within
about 10 seconds, vast sections of the grid were overwhelmed. The failed
lines in Ohio started a cascade that crashed several systems, despite a
structure built for this type of defense.
Outage 2: On August 29, 2003, a failure of England’s National Electric
Grid caused a blackout in Central and Southern London affecting more than
250,000 people, 270 sets of traffic lights, and 1,800 trains. According to the
3
latest findings, there was a fault in the volt system that apparently had not
been properly maintained.
Outage 3: On September 23, 2003, Eastern Denmark and Southern Sweden
experienced their worst blackout in 20 years. As maintenance issues have
been raised, both of these outages have thus far been attributed to equipment
failure.
Outage 4: On September 28, 2003, a power failure left most of Italy
without power for several hours interrupting rail and air traffic and jamming
emergency phone lines. Thousands were forced to take refuge in Rome’s
subways. As investigations revealed more information, it was found that the
Italian response was either lacking, or too slow, and that Italian operators had
made a wrong decision when coping with the interruption from Switzerland
and France. Consequently, a cascade of power line outages resulted within
Italy, and along its border.11
In 2011 Langer reported on a piece of malicious code that seems to target SCADA
systems and the PLCs that they control.12 This malicious code would come to be known
as Stuxnet. Stuxnet was different from most other worms in that it appears to have
limited its distribution to a targeted environment. It was initially introduced via a
Universal Serial Bus (USB) device, and exploited four zero-day vulnerabilities in
Microsoft Operations Systems to propagate itself throughout the SCADA system. It
appears to have been looking for the systems used to download logic into particular
Seimens PLCs. Once it verified that the PLCs were running the correct version of
software, it would replace that software with its own malicious version. It appears that
the intent of this code was to cause centrifuges in an uranium-enrichment facility to
break down. Chen and Abu-Nimeh report, ”The site’s production dropped 15 percent in
2009, around the time Stuxnet is believed to have begun spreading.”13
4. SCADA Vulnerabilities
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vulnerabilities in the Microsoft operating system to gain access to the PLCs where it
installed its payload. More and more SCADA systems are using COTS networking
technologies to include Ethernet and wireless networking, and they inherit all of the
vulnerabilities inherent in them. The move to open communication standards has
dramatically increased the availability of this information. Once upon a time the
protocols used by SCADA systems to communicate with the sensors and actuators were
proprietary and unavailable to most people. Today more than 90% of major SCADA and
automation vendors have all of their manuals and specifications available on-line to the
general public.14 This is great for compatibility but not for security. Many of the control
components such as PLCs, IEDs, and RTUs have very little additional computing power
available to implement increased security features. COTS IT hardware and software
have a life cycle of 3 to 5 years, but the life cycle of control components like PLCs, IEDs,
and RTUs is 15 to 20 years. This implies that administrators of these systems are likely to
be limited in their options because large pieces of their network are tied to technologies
that would be considered woefully obsolete by IT standards.
5. SCADA Countermeasures
The fact that SCADA systems are very important and vulnerable has been understood,15
and a significant body of work has been done to address these vulnerabilities. Many
researchers and standards bodies have written configuration guides for SCADA
systems. There are several researchers working vulnerability-assessment techniques.
Work has been done in almost every area of intrusion detection. Research is being
conducted in the use of cryptography and key management. Several people have created
test beds for research into SCADA systems.
In 2001 Paul Oman et al., provided an overview of the risks to SCADA systems and
provided 16 suggestions for hardening these systems.16 In 2002 Jonathan Pollet
advocated ”Rings of Defense.”14 In 2005 Calvert Bowen et al., advocated ”Defense in
Depth” and client puzzles. They also introduce the concept of performing a Denial of
Service (DoS) attack against oneself by implementing overly expensive
countermeasures.9
5
In 2011 Arun Velagapalli et al., advocated minimizing the Trusted Computing Base for
SCADA systems.17 Many government and industry agencies have published
comprehensive guidelines.18
There are limits to the effectiveness of configuration guides. If they are too complicated
or expensive to implement, they will often be ignored unless some regulatory pressure
exists to enforce them. In the IT field, configuration guides seem to suffer from a rapidly
moving target. By the time a configuration guide can be written, tested, vetted, and
approved the Operating System vendor has already released the next version requiring
the configuration guide to be rewritten, tested, vetted, and approved. It is not at all
unusual for systems in tightly regulated areas to be at least a version behind what is
being currently offered. This means that brand new systems are being purchased with an
operating system that is at least one version behind the latest. Given a life cycle of 3 to 5
years, organizations are often racing to upgrade before their systems reach their end of
life. These configuration guides are often publicly available in order to ensure that the
people who need them can get them; however, that means that we must assume that the
adversary has them as well.
Some very interesting work has been done to try to quantify the vulnerability of SCADA
systems. In 2004 Eric Byres et al., used attack trees to analyze the vulnerabilities in the
MODBUS/TCP SCADA protocol.19 This work has direct application to protocol design
and may make the next generation of protocols more secure. In 2006 Miles McQueen et
al., used a directed compromise graph to determine the impact measured in
time-to-compromise of security measures on a small SCADA system. He found an 86%
reduction in vulnerabilities could yielded a 30% increase in time-to-compromise.20 In
2007 Chee-Wooi Ten et al., proposed using attack trees to provide a quantitative
vulnerability assessment of a power plant’s SCADA system.21 In 2008 he refined this
approach; however, his models do not include OS Vulnerabilities.22 All of these efforts
are interesting proofs of concepts; however, their focus is so small as to bring into doubt
whether their results would scale to real-world systems.
6
deployed to protect networks today are signature-based. Signature based can be very
efficient and provide a low false-positive rate; however, they lack the ability to detect
zero-day attacks. In other words, they are always behind the adversary because the
signature cannot be written until someone has already been exploited.
Anomaly-detection systems work by learning what normal or benign traffic is and
reporting on any abnormal traffic. These systems have the potential to detect zero-day
exploits; however, it turns out that the complexity of modern networks makes
discovering what normal or benign traffic is a very difficult problem. Historically these
systems generate a significant number of false-positive alerts.
In the anomaly-detection camp are Steven Cheung et al., who in 2007 proposed using
model-based intrusion detection specifically for SCADA networks that use
MODBUS/TCP,23 and Wei Gao et al., who in 2010 proposed using a
neural-network-based, intrusion-detection system.24 Cheung and Gao both assumed that
the greater simplicity of SCADA systems and networks would allow them to get an
accurate enough picture of normal or benign traffic that the number of false positives
would be acceptable. They were able to present a proof of concept; however, their
research was so tightly focused that it is not clear that their results would scale to
real-world systems. Cheung focused upon one communication protocol out of the many
that are in use in SCADA environments. Gao focused on only one attack vector out of
the many that exist.
In 2007 Paul Oman and Matthew Phillips explored intrusion detection based upon
pattern recognition.15 Oman’s system was more traditional signature-based with an
anomaly-detection twist. He did do some very interesting work in the automated
creation of his signatures. He was able to describe the correct operation of various
devices and write rules that would fire if the traffic didn’t match that pattern. The
greatest limitation here is that rules would have to be written for every device in a
SCADA network. This would be a very daunting task for any organization that had a
primary mission other than research. It is this author’s opinion that the only way this
might be able to scale would be if vendors provided rule sets with their systems.
5.4 Cryptography
SCADA systems have the same authentication and confidentiality issues that are often
addressed in other computer systems using cryptography. Encrypting the traffic should
protect its confidentiality. The use of cryptographic signatures may be used to validate
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authentication. One could envision securing the MODBUS/TCP and similiar protocols
by adding a Secure Socket Layer much the same way that the Hyper Text Transport
Protocotol was secured. In order to do this, crytographic modules would have to be
installed on all devices for both Rivest Shamir Adleman (RSA) public key crytopgrphy
and the Adanced Encyption Standard (AES) symmetric key cryptography. RSA is used
for authentication and key exchange, and AES is used to encypt the session. That is a lot
of software to load on these devices and a lot of computing to expect some of these
devices to perform quickly enough to maintain their real-time requirements. An
additional problem with all cyrptographic systems is the distribution of keys. This
problem is exacerbated in a SCADA system because of the limited computing power,
small bandwidth, and disconnected nature of the components. In 2006 Robert Dawson et
al., proposed the SCADA Key Management Architecture as a replacement for SCADA
Key Establishment.25 In 2008 Ludovic Pietre-Cambacedes surveyed key management
technologies for SCADA documenting Key-server, Point-to-point, Standard Public Key
Infrastructure (PKI), and Customized PKI architectures.26
The long life cycle of this equipment presents a further challenge. A new protocol
invented today may take 15 to 20 years to fully deploy. Additionally the strength of
cryptography relies on certain problems being computationally infeasible. Moore’s Law
implies that what is computationally infeasible today will be feasible tomorrow. For
example the Data Encyption Standard (DES) had a 56-bit key. When DES was
developed, it was computationally infeasible to attempt every 56-bit combination to
decode a message. Today brute-forcing a 56-bit DES key can be done very quickly. Given
a 15- to 20-year life cycle, it is possible that the infeasibility assumptions will be invalid
before the system is fully deployed.
Since most production SCADA systems are too valuable to use for research and most
research organizations cannot afford to stand up a SCADA system, there has been a
significant amount of work in creating SCADA test beds. Oman was able to use the
University of Idaho’s Electrical Engineering Power Laboratory, ”a fully functioning
high-voltage facility.”15 In 2008 Annarita Giani et al., described the SCADA test bed that
they built to test DoS, Integrity, and phishing attacks.27 In 2011 Thomas Morris et al.,
described the Mississippi State University SCADA security laboratory.28
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6. Conclusions
SCADA systems are high-value targets where failure has the potential to cause massive
amounts of damage. The life cycle of SCADA equipment means that some elements
would be considered obsolete by computing standards. Configuration guides are good
but will not be effective unless they are easy to understand and inexpensive to
implement. Quantitative vulnerability-assessment techniques, although impressive, are
of very narrow focus and based upon assumptions. Intrusion-detection work is
significantly behind the same efforts in traditional network systems and what is being
done is very highly focused on one particular technology. Older PLCs with low
computing power make cryptography difficult to implement. Limited network
connectivity makes key management difficult as well.
9
7. References
5. Qiu B, Gooi HB. Web-based scada display systems (wsds) for access via internet.
Power Systems, IEEE Transactions on 2000;15(2):681–686.
8. Qiu B, Gooi HB, Liu Y, Chan EK. Internet-based scada display system. Computer
Applications in Power, IEEE 2002;15(1):14-19.
10. Igure VM, Laughter SA, Williams RD. Security issues in scada networks. Computers
& Security 2006;25(7):498 – 506.
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11. Fernandez JD, Fernandez AE. Scada systems: vulnerabilities and remediation. J.
Comput. Sci. Coll. 2005;20(4):160–168.
14. Pollet J. Developing a solid scada security strategy. In: Sensors for Industry
Conference, 2002. 2nd ISA/IEEE; p. 148–156.
15. Oman P, Phillips M. Intrusion detection and event monitoring in SCADA networks.
In: Critical Infrastructure Protection; Springer; 2007; p. 161–173.
16. Oman P, Schweitzer E, Roberts J. Safeguarding ieds, substations, and scada systems
against electronic intrusions. In: Proceedings of the 2001 western power delivery
automation conference; p. 9–12.
17. Velagapalli A, Ramkumar M. Minimizing the tcb for securing scada systems. In:
Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Workshop on Cyber Security and Information
Intelligence Research; CSIIRW ’11, New York (NY): ACM; 2011. p. 19:1–19:1.
18. Ralston P, Graham J, Hieb J. Cyber security risk assessment for SCADA and DCS
networks. ISA Transactions 2007;46(4):583 – 594.
19. Byres E, Franz M, Miller D. The use of attack trees in assessing vulnerabilities in
scada systems. In: Proceedings of the International Infrastructure Survivability
Workshop; 2004 December 5–8; Libson, Portugal. p. 1–9.
21. Ten C-W, Liu C-C, Govindarasu M. Vulnerability assessment of cybersecurity for
scada systems using attack trees. In: Power Engineering Society General Meeting,
2007. IEEE; p. 1–8.
22. Ten C-W, Liu C-C, Manimaran G. Vulnerability assessment of cybersecurity for
scada systems. Power Systems, IEEE Transactions on 2008;23(4):1836-1846.
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23. Cheung S, Dutertre B, Fong M, Lindqvist U, Skinner K, Valdes A. Using
model-based intrusion detection for scada networks. In: Proceedings of the SCADA
Security Scientific Symposium; 2007 January 24–25; Miami (FL). p. 1–12.
24. Gao W, Morris T, Reaves B, Richey D. On scada control system command and
response injection and intrusion detection. In: eCrime Researchers Summit (eCrime),
2010; p. 1–9.
25. Dawson R, Boyd C, Dawson E, Nieto JMG. Skma: a key management architecture for
scada systems. In: Proceedings of the 2006 Australasian workshops on Grid
computing and e-research - Volume 54; ACSW Frontiers ’06, Darlinghurst, Australia,
Australia: Australian Computer Society, Inc.; 2006. p. 183–192.
27. Giani A, Karsai G, Roosta T, Shah A, Sinopoli B, Wiley J. A testbed for secure and
robust scada systems. SIGBED Review 2008;5(2):4.
28. Morris T, Vaughn R, Dandass YS. A testbed for scada control system cybersecurity
research and pedagogy. In: Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Workshop on Cyber
Security and Information Intelligence Research; 2011 ; New York (NY). CSIIRW ’11,
New York (NY): ACM; 2011. p. 1–4.
12
List of Symbols, Abbreviations, and Acronyms
IT information technology
OS operating system
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1 DEFENSE TECHNICAL
(PDF) INFORMATION CTR
DTIC OCA
2 DIRECTOR
(PDF) US ARMY RESEARCH LAB
RDRL CIO LL
IMAL HRA MAIL & RECORDS MGMT
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