SaTC: CORE: Small: Automatic Exploits Detection and Mitigation for Industrial Control System Protocols

Industrial control systems (ICS) operates critical industrial infrastructure such as water and power, oil and gas, manufacturing and logistics, and other essential industries. Such systems consists of a complex network of interactive systems that control the critical aspects of the physical world. Traditionally, these control systems have been designed for isolated environments with no communication with the outside world.

The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) has played a key role in connecting ICS elements to the Internet. Their governing protocols, however, have not fundamentally changed to incorporate security principles into their design. There is a need for performing comprehensive security analyses on ICS protocols for their safe and secure operations over the Internet.

The broader impacts include partnerships with industry, and broadening the research participation of students from underrepresented backgrounds.

This project aims to explore a viable path to conduct a security analysis on ICS system protocols. This is challenging as ICS systems implement a mix of closed and open-source protocols and logging all execution paths of these protocols is not feasible. The project leverages model inference techniques to gain insights into the working of ICS protocols.

The key technique is to record the Finite State Machines (FSMs) of ICS protocols to infer their implementation models. The inferred model is then used to identify the protocols’ states and their transitions which are then validated against the security properties for analysis.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.