A Framework for Incident Response in Industrial Control Systems

Roman Schlegel, Ana Hristova, Sebastian Obermeier

2015

Abstract

Industrial control systems are used to control and supervise plants and critical infrastructures. They are crucial for operation of many industries and even society at large. However, despite efforts to secure such systems, there are frequent reports of incidents that lead to problems because of human error (e.g., installing unauthorized software on a mission-critical machine) or even cyber attacks. While such incidents should be prevented in the first place, it is not feasible to achieve 100% security; therefore, operators should be prepared to deal with incidents promptly and efficiently if they occur. In this paper, we present a general methodology and framework for investigating incidents in industrial control systems. The methodology is supported by a tool to automate an investigation, especially to efficiently determine the state of files on a device after an incident. This enables faster recovery from incidents by being able to identify suspicious files and focus on the files that have been modified compared to the initially installed files, or a previously taken baseline. An evaluation confirms the applicability of the methodology for an embedded industrial controller and for an industrial control system.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Schlegel R., Hristova A. and Obermeier S. (2015). A Framework for Incident Response in Industrial Control Systems . In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT, (ICETE 2015) ISBN 978-989-758-117-5, pages 178-185. DOI: 10.5220/0005510001780185

in Bibtex Style

@conference{secrypt15,
author={Roman Schlegel and Ana Hristova and Sebastian Obermeier},
title={A Framework for Incident Response in Industrial Control Systems},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT, (ICETE 2015)},
year={2015},
pages={178-185},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0005510001780185},
isbn={978-989-758-117-5},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT, (ICETE 2015)
TI - A Framework for Incident Response in Industrial Control Systems
SN - 978-989-758-117-5
AU - Schlegel R.
AU - Hristova A.
AU - Obermeier S.
PY - 2015
SP - 178
EP - 185
DO - 10.5220/0005510001780185