skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: PAtt: Physics-based Attestation of Control Systems
Ensuring the integrity of embedded programmable logic controllers (PLCs) is critical for safe operation of industrial control systems. In particular, a cyber-attack could manipulate control logic running on the PLCs to bring the process of safety-critical application into unsafe states. Unfortunately, PLCs are typically not equipped with hardware support that allows the use of techniques such as remote attestation to verify the integrity of the logic code. In addition, so far remote attestation is not able to verify the integrity of the physical process controlled by the PLC. In this work, we present PAtt, a system that combines remote software attestation with control process validation. PAtt leverages operation permutations—subtle changes in the operation sequences based on integrity measurements—which do not affect the physical process but yield unique traces of sensor readings during execution. By encoding integrity measurements of the PLC’s memory state (software and data) into its control operation, our system allows to remotely verify the integrity of the control logic based on the resulting sensor traces. We implement the proposed system on a real PLC controlling a robot arm, and demonstrate its feasibility. Our implementation enables the detection of attackers that manipulate the PLC logic to change process state and/or report spoofed sensor readings (with an accuracy of 97% against tested attacks).  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1705135
PAR ID:
10211575
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
22nd International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID 2019)
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; (, ACM)
    As part of Industrial Control Systems (ICS), the control logic controls the physical processes of critical infrastructures such as power plants and water and gas distribution. The Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) commonly manages these processes through actuators based on information received from sensor readings. Therefore, boundary checking is essential in ICS because sensor readings and actuator values must be within the safe range to ensure safe and secure ICS operation. In this paper, we propose an ontology-based approach to provide the knowledge required to verify the boundaries of ICS components with respect to their safety and security specifications. For the proof of concept, the formal model of the Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) is created in UPPAAL and validated in UPPAAL-API. Then, the proposed boundary verification algorithm is used to import the required information from the safety/security ontology 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; (, AI, Computer Science and Robotics Technology)
    This study outlines a novel intrusion detection system (IDS) to detect compromised sensor data anomalies in interdependent industrial processes. The IDS used a peer-to-peer communication framework which allowed multiple programmable logic controllers (PLCs) to communicate and share sensor data. Utilizing the shared sensor data, state estimators used a long short-term memory (LSTM) machine learning algorithm to identify anomalous sensor readings connected to neighboring PLCs controlling an interdependent physical process. This study evaluated the performance of the IDS on three industrial operations aligning to a midstream oil terminal. The framework successfully detected several multi-sensor compromises during mid-stream oil terminal operations. A set of performance evaluations also showed no impact on the real-time operations of the PLC and outlined the prediction latencies of the framework. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; (, NSF-ATE National Conference)
    A low-cost remote supervisory control capability is added to a packaging process, in which a low-voltage signal is used to communicate between a distant HMI control panel and a PLC network using the AC power line as a communication medium. The network is a star-topology and uses a Mater-slave protocol. Remote Supervisory control is achieved using a user-defined toolbox of control functions. In this system, a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) is used to control a process and interface with the operator through a Human Machine Interface (HMI) Panel. A star topology ethernet network is used to connect the PLCs and the HMI panel. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; ; ; ; (, 2019 SoutheastCon)
    In this paper we demonstrate two applications of a low-cost remote supervisory control and data acquisition system in two models. The first model is demonstrated with a Profibus-DP protocol based system in which a master Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) unit with control inputs and display outputs controls the speed and monitors the overload condition of a DC motor that is connected to a slave PLC in real time. In the upgraded model, a Profinet protocol is used to connect PLCs, and a power-line communication link is used to remotely connect the control HMI to the network. In both models, remote Supervisory control is achieved using user-defined control functions that act altogether as a block-oriented function library or toolbox. High levels of performance are achieved in real time control and data acquisition in both models. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; (, Proceedings of the 32nd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium)
    With the proliferation of autonomous safety-critical cyber-physical systems (CPS) in our daily life, their security is becoming ever more important. Remote attestation is a powerful mechanism to enable remote verification of system integrity. While recent developments have made it possible to efficiently attest IoT operations, autonomous systems that are built on top of real-time cyber-physical control loops and execute missions independently present new unique challenges. In this paper, we formulate a new security property, Realtime Mission Execution Integrity (RMEI) to provide proof of correct and timely execution of the missions. While it is an attractive property, measuring it can incur prohibitive overhead for the real-time autonomous system. To tackle this challenge, we propose policy-based attestation of compartments to enable a trade-off between the level of details in measurement and runtime overhead. To further minimize the impact on real-time responsiveness, multiple techniques were developed to improve the performance, including customized software instrumentation and timing recovery through re-execution. We implemented a prototype of ARI and evaluated its performance on five CPS platforms. A user study involving 21 developers with different skill sets was conducted to understand the usability of our solution. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email