Title
EDSGuard: Enforcing Network Security Requirements for Energy Delivery Systems
Abstract
Recently, energy delivery systems (EDS) have been targeted by sophisticated network-based attacks tailored to disrupt the proper distribution of energy among different geographical regions, resulting in non-trivial socio-economical loses and a loss of public confidence in EDS infrastructures. Such attacks were facilitated by the lack of native security measures regarding existing network communication protocols for EDS, which allowed attackers to deliberately manipulate the state of network connections between control modules and field devices. In order to address these concerns, this paper presents EDSGuard, a state-based firewall and monitoring tool that leverages state-of the-art packet inspection techniques along with software-defined networks (SDN), to intelligently implement a set of security requirements and best practices for protecting EDS networks, as issued by regulatory organizations within the EDS community in the last years. In addition, EDSGuard implements a series of first-response countermeasure strategies, which can automatically react to anomalies and attacks, thus effectively mitigating their consequences and impact as a result. We provide the overall rationale behind our approach, as well as a description of our experimental results depicting a set of attack scenarios inspired by recent incidents affecting EDS infrastructures, which provide evidence of the suitability of EDSGuard for being fully adopted in practice.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1109/SmartGridComm.2018.8587430
2018 IEEE International Conference on Communications, Control, and Computing Technologies for Smart Grids (SmartGridComm)
Keywords
Field
DocType
nontrivial socio-economical loss,packet inspection techniques,network communication protocols,geographical regions,network security requirements,attack scenarios,EDS community,EDS networks,software-defined networks,monitoring tool,state-based firewall,network connections,attackers,native security measures,EDS infrastructures,sophisticated network-based attacks,energy delivery systems,EDSGuard
Countermeasure,Network Communication Protocols,Deep packet inspection,Best practice,Firewall (construction),Computer science,Network security,Computer network,Energy delivery
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-5386-7955-5
1
0.37
References 
Authors
7
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Vu Coughlin110.37
Carlos E. Rubio-Medrano2185.78
Ziming Zhao332230.52
Gail-Joon Ahn43012203.39