Introduction to Cyber-Warfare - Proiect SEMPER FIDELIS

202 11. CYBER WARFARE AGAINST INDUSTRYindustrial control system, the NIST adds human safety and fault tolerance. These areimportant as the operation of ICS systems must prevent loss of life and avoidendangerment of public health or confidence. As a result, there is an important linkbetween security and safety in the ICS world.• Architecture. As we saw in the exploitation part of the book, many IT systems, particularlythose dealing with intellectual property were set up to use a centralized “repository.”Right or wrong, many IT professionals use this centralization to simplify requirements—they would just put more effort into the protection of the repository. In an industrialcontrol system, centralized servers are still very important. However, periphery systemsgain in significance: first, they often directly control industrial equipment (i.e., electricalsubstations are responsible for providing power directly to consumers), and second,outages in certain peripheral systems may lead to cascading failures.• Physical interaction. Outages in typical IT systems may not have consequences outside thevirtual world. However, outages in industrial control system often affect physicalequipment—leading to real-world consequences.• Time-critical response. In an IT system, often access control can be performed without regardto data flow. The NIST report points out that the question whether to compute anindustrial control system with automated or software responses that require humaninteraction potentially become critical. For example, requiring an operator to enter apassword at a certain juncture may delay an emergency operation that could result in lossof life or expensive damage to equipment.• System operations. As industrial control systems are part of a larger, often complicated,structure of controlling equipment, their management would require an individual skilledas a control engineer who better understands the impact of implementing security featureson the control of operations—in addition to mastering IT security.• Resource constraints. Many legacy industrial control operating systems currently in use,particularly those used for power grids, may be devices that are extremely underpoweredand resource-constrained by modern standards. These constraints may simply precludecommon (and easy) IT solutions that would otherwise increase security. Further, licenseagreements in place for these often proprietary solutions may legally prevent the use of athird-party security solution.• Communication protocols. As with industrial control operating systems, many ICScommunication protocols may also be proprietary—again precluding a common/easy ITsolution designed for more common network protocols such as IP. Further, in manystructures, such as a power grid, a mix of different network protocols may be used asopposed to a single protocol such as IP. 10• Change management. In IT systems, upgrades and patches to system software can oftenhappen swiftly and with relatively little difficulty once the vulnerability is found.Industrial control systems introduce several levels of complexity to the issue of patching/upgrading software. Due to the high-priority issues of avoiding loss of life or damage toequipment, software updates and patches go through a more rigorous certification processby vendors before being released. The end user (i.e., a local power company) will then alsoperform validation tests as an outage would be scheduled well in advance of the update.Further compounding difficulty here is the fact that some legacy ICS equipment will use