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Any safety issues or cyber attacks on an Industrial Control Systems (ICS) may have catastrophic consequences on human lives and the environment. Hence, it is imperative to have resilient tools and mechanisms to protect ICS. To verify the safety and security of the control logic, complete and consistent specifications should be defined to guide the testing process. Second, it is vital to ensure that those requirements are met by the program control algorithm. In this paper, we proposed an approach to formally define the system specifications, safety, and security requirements to build an ontology that is used further to verify the control logic of the PLC software. The use of ontology allowed us to reason about semantic concepts, check the consistency of concepts, and extract specifications by inference. For the proof of concept, we studied part of an industrial chemical process to implement the proposed approach. The experimental results in this work showed that the proposed approach detects inconsistencies in the formally defined requirements and is capable of verifying the correctness and completeness of the control logic. The tools and algorithms designed and developed as part of this work will help technicians and engineers create safer and more secure control logic for ICS processes.
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Conflict Analysis and Resolution of Safety and Security Boundary Conditions for Industrial Control Systems
Safety and security are the two most important properties of industrial control systems (ICS), and their integration is necessary to ensure that safety goals do not undermine security goals and vice versa. Sometimes, safety and security co-engineering leads to conflicting requirements or violations capable of impacting the normal behavior of the system. Identification, analysis, and resolution of conflicts arising from safety and security co-engineering is a major challenge, an under-researched area in safety-critical systems(ICS). This paper presents an STPA-SafeSec-CDCL approach that addresses the challenge. Our proposed methodology combines the STPA-SafeSec approach for safety and security analysis and the Conflict-Driven Clause Learning (CDCL) approach for the identification, analysis, and resolution of conflicts where conflicting constraints are encoded in satisfiability (SAT) problems. We apply our framework to the Tennessee Eastman Plant process model, a chemical process model developed specifically for the study of industrial control processes, to demonstrate how to use the proposed method. Our methodology goes beyond the requirement analysis phase and can be applied to the early stages of system design and development to increase system reliability, robustness, and resilience.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1846493
- PAR ID:
- 10407358
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2022 6th International Conference on System Reliability and Safety (ICSRS)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 145 to 156
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSRS56243.2022.10067393
