Security and Safety

RESICS : Resilience and Safety to attacks in Industrial Control and Cyber-Physical Systems

We all critically depend on and use digital systems that sense and control physical processes and environments. Electricity, gas, water, and other utilities require the continuous operation of both national and local infrastructures. Industrial processes, for example for chemical manufacturing, production of materials and manufacturing chains similarly lie at this intersection of the digital and the physical. This intersection also applies in other CPS such as robots, autonomous cars, and drones. Ensuring the resilience of such systems, their survivability and continued operation when exposed to malicious threats requires the integration of methods and processes from security analysis, safety analysis, system design and operation that have traditionally been done separately and that each involve specialist skills and a significant amount of human effort. This is not only costly, but also error prone and delays response to security events.

RESICS aims to significantly advance the state-of-the-art and deliver novel contributions that facilitate:

Risk analysis in the face of adversarial threats taking into account the impact of security events across cascading inter-dependencies
Characterising attacks that can have an impact on system safety and identifying the paths that make such attacks possible
Identifying countermeasures that can be applied to mitigate threats and contain the impact of attacks
Ensuring that such countermeasures can be applied whilst preserving the system’s safety and operational constraints and maximising its availability.

These contributions will be evaluated across several test beds, digital twins, a cyber range and a number of use-cases across different industry sectors.

To achieve these goals RESICS will combine model-driven and empirical approaches across both security and safety analysis, adopting a systems-thinking approach which emphasises Security, Safety and Resilience as emerging properties of the system. RESICS leverages preliminary results in the integration of safety and security methodologies with the application of formal methods and the combination of model-based and empirical approaches to the analysis of inter-dependencies in ICSs and CPSs.

Funded by DSTL, this is a joint project between the Resilient Information Systems Security (RISS) Group at Imperial College and the Bristol Cyber Security Group. The work will be conducted in collaboration with: Adelard (part of NCC Group), Airbus, Qinetiq, Reperion, Siemens, Thales as industry partners and CMU, University of Naples and SUTD as academic partners. The project is affiliated with the Research Institute in Trustworthy Inter-Connected Cyber-Physical Systems (RITICS)

Project Publications

Mathuros, Kornkamon, Sarad Venugopalan, and Sridhar Adepu. “WaXAI: Explainable Anomaly Detection in Industrial Control Systems and Water Systems.” Proceedings of the 10th ACM Cyber-Physical System Security Workshop. 2024. Awarded Best paper Award.
Ruizhe Wang, Sarad Venugopalan and Sridhar Adepu. “Safety Analysis for Cyber-Physical Systems under Cyber Attacks Using Digital Twin” in IEEE Cyber Security and Resilience 2024.

Other relevant publications

Maiti, Rajib Ranjan, Sridhar Adepu, and Emil Lupu. “ICCPS: Impact discovery using causal inference for cyber attacks in CPSs.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.14161 (2023). Under submission.
L. M. Castiglione and E. C. Lupu, “Which Attacks Lead to Hazards? Combining Safety and Security Analysis for Cyber-Physical Systems,” in IEEE T. on Dependable and Secure Computing, doi: 10.1109/TDSC.2023.3309778.
L. M. Castiglione et al., “HA-Grid: Security Aware Hazard Analysis for Smart Grids,” 2022 IEEE Int. Conf on Communications, Control, and Computing Technologies for Smart Grids (SmartGridComm), Singapore, 2022, doi: 10.1109/SmartGridComm52983.2022.9961003.
L. M. Castiglione, P. Stassen, C. Perner, D. P. Pereira, G. de Carvalho Bertoli and E. C. Lupu, “Don’t Panic! Analysing the Impact of Attacks on the Safety of Flight Management Systems,” 2023 IEEE/AIAA 42nd Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC), Barcelona, 2023, doi: 10.1109/DASC58513.2023.10311328.

Presentations

Hazard Driven Threat Modelling for Cyber Physical Systems

Luca Maria Castiglione and Emil C. Lupu. 2020. Hazard Driven Threat Modelling for Cyber Physical Systems. In Proceedings of the 2020 Joint Workshop on CPS&IoT Security and Privacy(CPSIOTSEC’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 13–24.

Adversarial actors have shown their ability to infiltrate enterprise networks deployed around Cyber Physical Systems (CPSs) through social engineering, credential stealing and file-less infections. When inside, they can gain enough privileges to maliciously call legitimate APIs and apply unsafe control actions to degrade the system performance and undermine its safety. Our work lies at the intersection of security and safety, and aims to understand dependencies among security, reliability and safety in CPS/IoT. We present a methodology to perform hazard driven threat modelling and impact assessment in the context of CPSs. The process starts from the analysis of behavioural, functional and architectural models of the CPS. We then apply System Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) on the functional model to highlight high-level abuse cases. We leverage a mapping between the architectural and the system theoretic(ST) models to enumerate those components whose impairment provides the attacker with enough privileges to tamper with or disrupt the data-flows. This enables us to find a causal connection between the attack surface (in the architectural model) and system level losses. We then link the behavioural and system theoretic representations of the CPS to quantify the impact of the attack. Using our methodology it is possible to compute a comprehensive attack graph of the known attack paths and to perform both a qualitative and quantitative impact assessment of the exploitation of vulnerabilities affecting target nodes. The framework and methodology are illustrated using a small scale example featuring a Communication Based Train Control (CBTC) system. Aspects regarding the scalability of our methodology and its application in real world scenarios are also considered. Finally, we discuss the possibility of using the results obtained to engineer both design time and real time defensive mechanisms.

Paper