Legacy-Compliant Data Authentication for Industrial Control System Traffic

Abstract

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) commonly rely on unencrypted and unauthenticated communication between devices such as Programmable Logic Controllers, Human-Machine-Interfaces, sensors, and actuators. In this work, we discuss solutions to extend such environments with established cryptographic authentication schemes. In particular, we consider schemes that are legacy compliant in the sense that authentication data is embedded as additional payload for domain specific protocols, for example the industrial EtherNet/IP protocol. To that end, we propose a selective protocol (that signs every critical packet sent) and a protocol that aggregates groups of packets based on real-time requirements and the available throughput, for various realistic hardware configurations. We evaluate our analysis by implementing an authenticated channel in a realistic Water Treatment testbed.

Publication
Proceedings of the Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS)
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