Assessment And Testing of Industrial Devices Robustness Against Cyber Security Attacks

CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research),like any organization, needs to achieve the conflicting objectives of connecting its operational network to Internet while at the same time keeping its industrial control systems secure from external and internal cyber attacks. With this in mind, the ISA-99[0F1] international cyber security standard has been adopted at CERN as a reference model to define a set of guidelines and security robustness criteria applicable to any network device. Devices robustness represents a key link in the defense-in-depth concept as some attacks will inevitably penetrate security boundaries and thus require further protection measures. When assessing the cyber security robustness of devices we have singled out control system-relevant attack patterns derived from the well-known CAPEC[1F2] classification. Once a vulnerability is identified, it needs to be documented, prioritized and reproduced at will in a dedicated test environment for debugging purposes. CERN - in collaboration with SIEMENS - has designed and implemented a dedicated working environment, the Test-bench for Robustness of Industrial Equipments[2F3] (“TRoIE”). Such tests attempt to detect possible anomalies by exploiting corrupt communication channels and manipulating the normal behavior of the communication protocols, in the same way as a cyber attacker would proceed. This document provides an inventory of security guidelines[3F4] relevant to the CERN industrial environment and describes how we have automated the collection and classification of identified vulnerabilities into a test-bench.