Investigation of Cyber Attacks on a Water Distribution System

TL;DR

A study to investigate the impact of cyber attacks on a water distribution (WADI) system using a specially designed tool that enables the launch of single and multi-point attacks where the latter are designed to specifically hide one or more attacks.

Abstract

A Cyber Physical System (CPS) consists of cyber components for computation and communication, and physical components such as sensors and actuators for process control. These components are networked and interact in a feedback loop. CPS are found in critical infrastructure such as water distribution, power grid, and mass transportation. Often these systems are vulnerable to attacks as the cyber components such as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition workstations, Human Machine Interface and Programmable Logic Controllers are potential targets for attackers. In this work, we report a study to investigate the impact of cyber attacks on a water distribution (WADI) system. Attacks were designed to meet attacker objectives and launched on WADI using a specially designed tool. This tool enables the launch of single and multi-point attacks where the latter are designed to specifically hide one or more attacks. The outcome of the experiments led to a better understanding of attack propagation and behavior of WADI in response to the attacks as well as to the design of an attack detection mechanism for water distribution system.

Figures (15)

• Figure 1: Key components in a CPS. State transformation of a CPS in a feedback control loop.
• Figure 2: Architecture of the control portion of a CPS. P1, P2,…,Pn denote PLCs. Each PLC communicates with its sensors and actuators through a local network at Level 0. PLCs communicate among themselves via another network at Level 1. Communication with SCADA and other computers is not shown here.
• Figure 3: Three stages in WADI are shown. Solid arrows indicate flow of water and sequence of processes. S: set of sensors; A: set of actuators. LT-Level Transmitter, AIT-Analyzer Indication Transmitter, FIT-Flow Indication Transmitter, PIT-Pressure Indication Transmitter, LS-Level Switch. Actuators: P-Pump, MV-Motorized valve, MCV-Modulating Control Valve, SV-Solenoid Valve. Tag name of the instrument is indicated as XXX_YYY_ZZZ, where XXX, YYY and ZZZ represent stage number, instrument type and instrument index, respectively.
• Figure 4: Attack 1: Water level readings of three stages. Attacker brings the level of 1_LT_001 to 40%.
• Figure 5: Attack 1: Flow to the consumer tanks and consumers are cut-off from water supply from little over 3500 seconds onwards.