An Experimental Platform for Security of Cyber Physical Systems
R. Prabha, Sriram Sankaran · 2019
Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) are emerging as a current research discipline at the convergence of physical, biological, engineering and data sciences. As technology evolves, Cyber Physical Systems become vulnerable to a wider spectrum of threats. Addressing these threats require the need for novel solutions for protecting critical infrastructure. However, there are two distinct challenges faced by researchers from cross-disciplinary fields such as energy systems, data science, and cyber security. First, there are lack of experimental platforms integrating industry-standard hardware, software and protocols. This impedes the research of conducting cybersecurity study on CPS including vulnerabilities connected with CPS parts and modeling their corresponding impact. Second, the absence of systematic labelled data along with other information relevant to the model poses hazards to the growth and assessment of data mining algorithms that can classify CPS cyber threats. Therefore, an experimental platform is required to model attacks and understand their impact on system operations and endusers and further develop analytics based security solutions to mitigate them. In this paper, we develop a cyber physical testbed using NS-3 network simulator in conjunction with Raspberry Pi acting as a proxy for CPS hardware components. In addition, we model a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS), a potential cyber threat in CPS using NS-3. Finally, we develop an anomaly detection system using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) that uses network layer parameters to distinguish between normal and anomalous behaviour. Evaluation shows that our proposed system achieves an accuracy of 98.32%.