Search

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are increasingly integrated with Information Technology (IT) systems, blending Operational Technology (OT) and IT components. This evolution introduces new cyber-attack risks, necessitating specialized security measures like Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). This paper presents our work on both developing an experimental protocol and conducting tests of various IDS types in a digital substation hardware in the loop (HIL) testbed, offering insights into their performance in realistic scenarios. Our findings reveal significant variations in IDS effectiveness against industrial-specific cyber-attacks, with IT-specific IDSs struggling to detect certain attacks and changing testlab conditions affecting the assessment of ICS-specific IDSs. The challenges faced in creating valid and reliable evaluation metrics underscore the complexities of replicating operational ICS conditions. This research enhances our understanding of IDS effectiveness in ICS settings and underscores the importance of further experimental research in HIL testlab environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is a standard routing protocol for the Low Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs). It is a part of the IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Network (6LoWPAN) protocol stack. Features such as energy-efficient mechanisms and availability of the secure modes of operations make RPL suitable for the constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Hence, the majority of IoT applications rely on RPL for data communication. However, routing security in RPL-based IoT networks is a significant concern, motivating us to study and analyze routing attacks and suggested countermeasures against them. To this end, we provide a comprehensive survey on the state-of-the-art security threats and their corresponding countermeasures in RPL-based IoT networks. Based on our study, we propose a novel classification scheme that uses a mapping between RPL attacks and their countermeasure techniques to the RPL control messages used to develop these techniques. Furthermore, we provide an in-depth statistical analysis that includes analysis of routing attacks through the RPL control messages, distribution of various mitigation techniques as per the method used, RPL control messages involved in the mitigation techniques, and details of the tools used by multiple researchers. In the end, we highlight some open challenges and future research opportunities on this topic. We believe that this survey will be beneficial to researchers and practitioners working in the area of RPL security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: The cyber‐security threats to low‐cost end‐user devices could severely undermine the expected deployment of Internet of Thing (IoT) solutions in a range of real‐world applications such as environment monitoring, transportation, and manufacturing. Additionally, the huge amount of data generated by these devices posses new challenges concerning tasks such as efficient information acquisition and analysis, decision making, and action implementation. In this paper, we propose CENSOR, a novel cloud‐enabled secure IoT network architecture based on SDN paradigm. We discuss the significant benefits as well as challenges that are inherent while performing integration of SDN and IoT in CENSOR. We show that the emerging software‐based networking features combined with the cloud computing solutions can significantly improve the security and communication reliability in the target IoT scenarios. In particular, to provide the adequate security measures in the network, CENSOR uses a lightweight and scalable software remote attestation scheme, which ensures the integrity of the software that is being executed by the IoT devices to achieve the application specific goals in the network. We further discuss the improvements in data communication and data overhead that can be achieved in CENSOR due to its convergence with the cloud computing (at back‐end) and fog computing services (at edge routers or front‐end). A Smart City use‐case has been considered as a target IoT scenario to analyze the feasibility and effectiveness of CENSOR concerning the communication security and the network scalability parameters. Additionally, we provide future research directions along with the recent industry initiatives that include open issues in the integration and deployment of cloud‐enabled SDN‐based IoT networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]