Cyber-Physical Taint Analysis in Multi-stage Manufacturing Systems (MMS): A Case Study
This work addresses intrusion diagnosis in manufacturing systems, but it is incremental as it adapts an existing method to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of applying dynamic taint analysis (DTA) to multi-stage manufacturing systems (MMS) by extending it with manufacturing-specific taint propagation rules, and demonstrates preliminary intrusion diagnosis on a small-scale test-bed.
Information flows are intrinsic properties of an multi-stage manufacturing systems (MMS). In computer security, a basic information flow tracking technique is dynamic taint analysis (DTA). DTA tracks taint propagation from one data variable (e.g., a buffer holding a HTTP request) to another. Taint propagation paths are typically determined by data flows and implicit flows in a computer program. And the union of all the taint propagation paths forms a taint graph. It is clear that taints graphs could significantly enhance intrusion diagnosis. However, the existing DTA techniques cannot be directly used in an MMS, and a main reason is as follows: Without manufacturing-specific taint propagation rules, DTA cannot be implemented. In this work, we conduct a case study which (a) extends the existing DTA method with manufacturing-specific taint propagation rules, and (b) applies the extended method to perform preliminary intrusion diagnosis with a small-scale test-bed.