Cybersecurity Evaluation Framework for Industrial Control Systems

Evaluating the cybersecurity of a complex Industrial Control Systems (ICS), such as the Railway Transportation System (RTS), against a variety of cyber threats is a significantly hard and multi-faceted problem. To address this problem: (1) a semantically correct model-driven tool is needed for engineering of the ICS; (2) the cyber threat models must also be formally defined and the associated risks to the ICS and potential mitigation actions must be thoroughly analyzed; (3) assumptions about the ICS, its environment, and the adversary must be explicitly specified; (4) operational metrics suitable for analyzing operational impact of cyber threats must be identified and formally defined; (5) realistic data must be used for the quantitative cybersecurity evaluation; and (6) methods are needed that enable the ICS design and analysis tool to exchange relevant information with the risk assessment and mitigation tool. This project will develop a comprehensive tool-suite that aims to provide: (a) a model-based "networked" co-simulation/emulation platform for the railway infrastructure; (2) hardware-in-the-loop simulation; (3) a Risk Analysis Framework (RAF) that enables prioritization of vulnerabilities to secure against and evaluation of risk mitigation workflows against adversarial attack plans; and (4) an integration architecture for symbiotically combining and using the simulation framework with the risk analysis framework.