Uncovering Vulnerable Industrial Control Systems from the Internet Core
This addresses security risks for critical infrastructure and the Internet ecosystem, but it is incremental as it builds on existing traffic analysis techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of insecure inter-domain industrial control system (ICS) traffic by analyzing data from an IXP and an ISP, correlating it with honeypots and scans to identify vulnerable systems. The result provides a method to filter harmful traffic and detect unprotected ICS communications, though no concrete numbers are given.
Industrial control systems (ICS) are managed remotely with the help of dedicated protocols that were originally designed to work in walled gardens. Many of these protocols have been adapted to Internet transport and support wide-area communication. ICS now exchange insecure traffic on an inter-domain level, putting at risk not only common critical infrastructure but also the Internet ecosystem (e.g., DRDoS~attacks). In this paper, we uncover unprotected inter-domain ICS traffic at two central Internet vantage points, an IXP and an ISP. This traffic analysis is correlated with data from honeypots and Internet-wide scans to separate industrial from non-industrial ICS traffic. We provide an in-depth view on Internet-wide ICS communication. Our results can be used i) to create precise filters for potentially harmful non-industrial ICS traffic, and ii) to detect ICS sending unprotected inter-domain ICS traffic, being vulnerable to eavesdropping and traffic manipulation attacks.