Towards Practical Attestation Solutions for Countering Advanced Attacks to Industrial Control Systems (NSoE)

Towards Practical Attestation Solutions for Countering Advanced Attacks to Industrial Control Systems (NSoE)

Project date

1 October 2019 – 31 December 2022

completed

Co-PI

Assoc Prof. Sun Jun, SMU, Prof Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, ADSC

Partners & sponsors

Cybersecurity Agency of Singapore

Researchers

Dr Chen Yuqi, SMU; Lin Wei, ADSC

Project manager

Siti Nadhirah Shaik Nasair Johar

Research Category

Cyber Physical Systems

Industrial control systems (ICS) monitor and operate critical infrastructures via logic implemented on their component devices — e.g., programmable logic controllers (PLCs). The PLC code may be maliciously modified in different ways, e.g., through runtime memory modification or tampering with the binary code. Once the PLC code is modified, the safety and security of CPS can be compromised. This project seeks to develop practical defender attestation techniques that can be applied to iTrust ICS testbeds and eventually to real-world systems. The developed solution will be able to cope with the lack of hardware support and software privilege and also ensure that attestation does not affect the ICS operations. We will also play the role of attacker to develop advanced techniques for attacking existing attestation techniques and co-evolve the defender and attacker to develop effective attestation techniques that are resilient against the sophisticated attackers.