How Feasible Moving Target Defense is Within ICS Environment
Hadi Almusaher, Gulzar Alam · International Petroleum Technology Conference · 2020
Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are designed to work for long periods of time with a very deterministic behavior as availability and reliability are the most important requirements mandated in operating critical infrastructures. Embracing cyber security defenses in such environments is of utmost importance as compromising these systems may lead to significant impacts to the facilities operated by such systems. Here, the order is control, availability, integrity and confidentiality as opposed to CIA model adopted in equivalent IT networks. This paper attepts to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of moving target defense as security protection within ICS environment considering packet latency as the main metric. Among the available MTD mechanisms, this paper selects to simulate the IP randomization capitalizing on the use of Software Defined Networks (SDN). It encourages applying MTD within ICS environment provided that packet size is maintained around 1024 bytes which introduces a delay under 50 mSec, an acceptable latency to large ICS installations around the world.