Premium
Industrial control protocols in the Internet core: Dismantling operational practices
Author(s) -
Nawrocki Marcin,
Schmidt Thomas C.,
Wählisch Matthias
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
international journal of network management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.373
H-Index - 28
eISSN - 1099-1190
pISSN - 1055-7148
DOI - 10.1002/nem.2158
Subject(s) - computer science , core (optical fiber) , industrial internet , control (management) , the internet , engineering management , internet of things , telecommunications , computer security , world wide web , artificial intelligence , engineering
Summary Industrial control systems (ICS) are managed remotely with the help of dedicated protocols that were originally designed to work in walled gardens. Many of these protocols have been adapted to Internet transport and support wide‐area communication. ICS now exchange insecure traffic on an inter‐domain level, putting at risk not only common critical infrastructure but also the Internet ecosystem (e.g., by DRDoS attacks). In this paper, we measure and analyze inter‐domain ICS traffic at two central Internet vantage points, an IXP and an ISP. These traffic observations are correlated with data from honeypots and Internet‐wide scans to separate industrial from non‐industrial ICS traffic. We uncover mainly unprotected inter‐domain ICS traffic and provide an in‐depth view on Internet‐wide ICS communication. Our results can be used (i) to create precise filters for potentially harmful non‐industrial ICS traffic and (ii) to detect ICS sending unprotected inter‐domain ICS traffic, being vulnerable to eavesdropping and traffic manipulation attacks. Additionally, we survey recent security extensions of ICS protocols, of which we find very little deployment. We estimate an upper bound of the deployment status for ICS security protocols in the Internet core.