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At least 109 records · Page 6

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NASA NTRS2010

Anatomy of a Security Operations Center

Many agencies and corporations are either contemplating or in the process of building a cyber Security Operations Center (SOC). Those Agencies that have established SOCs are most likely working on major revisions or enhancements to existing capabilities. As principle developers of the NASA SOC; this Presenters' goals are to provide the GFIRST community with examples of some of the key building blocks of an Agency scale cyber Security Operations Center. This presentation viII include the inputs and outputs, the facilities or shell, as well as the internal components and the processes necessary to maintain the SOC's subsistence - in other words, the anatomy of a SOC. Details to be presented include the SOC architecture and its key components: Tier 1 Call Center, data entry, and incident triage; Tier 2 monitoring, incident handling and tracking; Tier 3 computer forensics, malware analysis, and reverse engineering; Incident Management System; Threat Management System; SOC Portal; Log Aggregation and Security Incident Management (SIM) systems; flow monitoring; IDS; etc. Specific processes and methodologies discussed include Incident States and associated Work Elements; the Incident Management Workflow Process; Cyber Threat Risk Assessment methodology; and Incident Taxonomy. The Evolution of the Cyber Security Operations Center viII be discussed; starting from reactive, to proactive, and finally to proactive. Finally, the resources necessary to establish an Agency scale SOC as well as the lessons learned in the process of standing up a SOC viII be presented.

Wang, John↗

DOE OSTI2021

Cyber-physical security framework for Photovoltaic Farms

With the evolution of PV converters, a growing number of vulnerabilities in PV farms are exposing to cyber threats. To mitigate the influence of cyber-attack on PV farms, it is necessary to study attacks' impact and propose detection methods. To meet this requirement, a cyber-physical security framework is proposed for PV farms. Data integrity attacks (DIAs) are studied on different control loops. As μPMU is gaining in popularity, a lower sampling rate of μPMU data is applied to develop a detection algorithm. We have evaluated two data-driven methods, which are support vector machine (SVM) and long short-term memory (LSTM). Lastly, the data-driven methods verify the feasibility of μPMU data in attack detection.

Attack Impact Analysis↗

NASA NTRS2019

Cyber Physical Security (CPS) Extension to Air Traffic Management (ATM) Testbed

The Air Traffic Management (ATM) Testbed is being developed at NASA to enable benefit, impact, safety and cost assessments for accelerating the deployment of Concept and Technologies (C&T) in the National Airspace System (NAS). Today, C&T introduction into the NAS takes decades. The primary reason for this is an inability to assess the operational impact of the interaction between the proposed C&T and operationally deployed systems (Realistic Technologies) in terms of NAS-wide safety, traffic flow efficiency, roles and workload of controllers and traffic managers, and impact on airline fleet operations. Transition of C&T to operations requires mathematical modeling and simulation, Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) testing and shadow-mode evaluation driven by operational data. Whereas interaction with the operational system during testing and stages of deployment is not permissible due to safety concerns, it is certainly possible to create a simulation environment that closely mimics the NAS using the same operational systems/hardware for enabling such assessments. This presentation focuses on a proposed Cyber Physical Security extension to the ATM Testbed for creating a modeling and simulation architecture to study how well the Air Traffic Management system will perform and analyze effectiveness of mitigating security measures against particular cyber-attack scenarios.

Datta, Koushik↗

DOE OSTI2020

A holistic cyber-physical security protocol for authenticating the provenance and integrity of structural health monitoring imagery data

Modern infrastructure systems, such as bridges, dams, power generation stations, and buildings increasingly have an intrinsic cyber-physical nature to them. Infrastructure now commonly, includes actuators, network connections, sensors, control systems, and computational resources. It is of increasing concern that modern infrastructure is vulnerable to cyber-attacks that can damage both the cyber and physical nature of the infrastructure. To date, the physical and cyber health of infrastructure has been considered separately. However, the increasing concerns associated with the cyber-physical security of infrastructure coupled with the emergence of 5G networks made using components that are not universally considered trustworthy, and the emergence of techniques for creating deepfakes and adversarial examples suggests the time has come to begin considering cyber health and structural health with a more holistic approach. In this work, a protocol is developed for ensuring the imagery data captured by a structural health monitoring system can be unambiguously attributed to legitimate sensors associated with the structural health monitoring system. A computer vision approach based on the idea of mutual information is then presented to detect damage in an image. This work presents the protocol for authenticating the provenance of imager data and demonstrates that this protocol does not have overly adverse effects when used with the mutual information-based technique for detecting damage in the resulting imagery data.

Jung, HweeKwon↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Cyber Threats & Security Controls Analysis for Urban Air Mobility Environments

Since the cyber threat landscape changes daily, cybersecurity needs to be an ongoing activity for every organization within the UAM environments. This paper will provide information on identified cyber threats and controls associated with an instance of the Urban Air Mobility (UAM) environment. The MITRE ATT&CK model and framework and the selection of cyber threats and the National Institute of Standards and Technology publications for security control identification and cybersecurity risk identification will be leveraged for analysis.

Cyber Threats↗

DOE OSTI2020

Hypergames and Cyber-Physical Security for Control Systems

The identification of the Stuxnet worm in 2010 provided a highly publicized example of a cyber attack that physically damaged an industrial control system. This raised public awareness about the possibility of similar attacks against other industrial targets—including critical infrastructure. Here, we use hypergames to analyze how strategic perturbations of sensor readings and calibrated parameters can be used to manipulate a system that employs optimal control. Hypergames form an extension of game theory that enables us to model strategic interactions where the players may have significantly different perceptions of the game(s) they are playing. Past work with hypergames has focused on relatively simple interactions consisting of a small set of discrete choices for each player. Here, we apply single-stage hypergames to larger systems with continuous variables. We find that manipulating constraints can be a more effective attacker strategy than manipulating objective function parameters. Moreover, the attacker need not change the underlying system to carry out a successful attack—it may be sufficient to deceive the defender controlling the system. It is possible to scale our approach up to even larger systems, but this will depend on the characteristics of the system in question, and we identify several characteristics that will make those systems amenable to hypergame analysis.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

DOE OSTI2025

FEMP Cybersecurity Arsenal

The FEMP Cyber Security Arsenal is a family of cyber security tools for the federal facility owners and operators. Using these tools, facility owners can evaluate their overall cybersecurity posture. These tools are web-based front-end tools. The tools are meant to help federal owners and operators to evaluate their overall cybersecurity posture. These tools are developed based on the NIST Cybersecurity framework, risk management framework, and DOE C2M2 architectures. Version 3 provides significant updates and features in ten areas

Ashley, Travis [Pacific Northwest National Laborat↗

DOE OSTI2023

Canada-US Blended Cyber-Physical Security Exercise (Final Report)

The Canada-US Blended Cyber-Physical Exercise was a successful, first of its kind, multiorganization and multi-laboratory exercise that culminated years of complex system development and planning. The project aimed to answer three driving research questions, (1) How do cyberattacks support malicious acts leading to theft or sabotage [at a nuclear site]? (2) What are aspects of an effective combined cyber-physical response? (3) How to evaluate effectiveness of that response? Which derived the following primary objectives, 1. The May 2023 Cyber-Physical Exercise shall present a cyber-attack scenario that supports malicious acts leading to theft or sabotage. 2. The May 2023 Cyber-Physical Exercise shall define aspects of an effective combined cyber-physical response. 3. Analysis of the May 2023 Cyber-Physical Exercise shall evaluate the effectiveness of the incident response against pre-established exercise evaluation criteria. 4. Analysis of the May 2023 Cyber-Physical Exercise shall assess the effectiveness of the evaluation criteria itself. 5. Exercises shall be performed in a real-life environment. The team believes these objectives were met, and the evidence will be presented in this report. Due to the novelty of the exercise, there were several lessons learned that will be presented in this report.

45 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, WEAPONRY, AND NATIONAL DEF↗

NASA NTRS2021

Simulation and Modeling Concepts for Secure Airspace Operations

This paper examines cyber security vulnerabilities of Urban Air Mobility operations. With the expected advent of new entrants including Unmanned Aerial Systems, Commercial Launch Vehicles and Urban Air Mobility aircraft, the future United States National Airspace System will have to evolve to include their operations along with the current commercial, general aviation and military operations. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Federal Aviation Administration are working together to provide a vision for aviation operations in the future—2045 and beyond. Their National Airspace System Horizons initiative seeks to provide stakeholders a list of operational scenarios and technologies, concepts and strategies needed for supporting that vision. They have identified cybersecurity as one of the seven strategic interest areas for realizing this vision. Consequently, NASA is studying cyber resiliency for secure airspace operations. While there are many pathways to attack a cyber physical system such as Urban Air Mobility, their effect is expressed in modification or corruption of data/information used for controlling vehicles and making operational decisions. The paper describes cybersecurity technologies of Encryption, Blockchain, Virtual Information Fabric Infrastructure, Trusted Platform Module and Anomaly Detection for protecting the data, and the cyber resiliency of the current and future air traffic management system.

Urban Air Mobility↗

NASA NTRS2021

Simulation and Modeling Concepts for Secure Airspace Operations

Urban Air Mobility↗

DOE OSTI2023

Requirements and Recommendations for a Physical Attack Characterization Framework

This study seeks to identify existing frameworks or develop requirements and recommendations for a new framework that can consistently characterize physical attacks, analogous to MITRE ATT&CK®. MITRE ATT&CK is widely used across government, research organizations, and the cyber security community to characterize cyber attack tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) in a consistent and commonly understood manner. While physical attack taxonomies, methodologies, and other tools for evaluating physical security do exist, many are sector and/or facility-type specific—and therefore not able to provide comparable scenarios across sectors—or are more focused on security assessment instead of the characterization of attacks themselves. A MITRE ATT&CK analog for physical attacks on critical infrastructure would provide a common language and structure for analysis of physical attacks. Existing attack characterization methodologies do not robustly address cyber-physical security risks. To fully understand a facility’s security needs, it is important to understand the entire vulnerability landscape from both a physical and a cyber perspective. To underscore this need, organizations such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) are calling for a coordinated approach to cyber and physical security, which they refer to as cyber and physical security convergence. A physical attack characterization framework that could be used jointly with MITRE ATT&CK would help support a more robust analysis in support of convergence, enabling the consistent characterization of attacks that utilize both cyber and physical tactics and techniques. This could provide analysts and stakeholders with a clearer understanding of how security mitigations deployed in the physical realm impact security risks in the cyber realm, and vice versa. In this study, the project team evaluates existing physical security taxonomies and methodologies to assess whether an existing method can be used to create a “physical half” of MITRE ATT&CK. This study then provides requirements and recommendations for a framework that can leverage aspects of existing methodologies. The goal of the final framework is for it to be widely adopted and referenced, regardless of critical infrastructure sector, facility type, or facility components. This study also identifies applicable use cases for when and how a framework could be applied across the various critical infrastructure sectors for a variety of attack types or motivations. Through a literature review of existing security-focused methodologies and taxonomies, engagement with relative stakeholders, evaluation of potential physical attack framework use cases, and subsequent identification of requirements, this study identified the following key findings and recommendations: There is a need for a new physical attack characterization framework; A physical attack framework should be interoperable with the MITRE ATT&CK framework; A physical attack framework should be broadly applicable, but with detailed tactics, techniques, and procedures that encompass the entire attack path; A physical attack framework should be based on observed or feasible events; A physical attack framework should adapt features from existing methodologies, frameworks, and taxonomies; A physical attack framework should be owned, overseen, and maintained by one organization.

45 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, WEAPONRY, AND NATIONAL DEF↗

DOE OSTI2022

Security Architecture for Microgrid Integration

The purpose of this document is to present cyber security risk considerations and mitigations for community microgrids. The mitigations discussed herein specifically focus on cyber security technical requirements for the De-centralized Autonomous Community Controller (DAC) as part of the SECURE project’s technology development effort. These requirements also consider the associated security implementation challenges involved with the decentralized characteristics of microgrids where upstream communications to utility security management functions are lost. These security recommendations and technical requirements may be used by microgrid implementers and technology vendors to specify the security design of the microgrid systems and their components.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

DOE OSTI2022

Cross-Layered Distributed Data-Driven Framework for Enhanced Smart Grid Cyber-Physical Security

Smart Grid (SG) research and development has drawn much attention from academia, industry and government due to the great impact it will have on society, economics and the environment. Securing the SG is a considerably significant challenge due the increased dependency on communication networks to assist in physical process control, exposing them to various cyber-threats. In addition to attacks that change measurement values using False Data Injection (FDI) techniques, attacks on the communication network may disrupt the power system's real-time operation by intercepting messages, or by flooding the communication channels with unnecessary data. Addressing these attacks requires a cross-layer approach. In this paper a cross-layered strategy is presented, called Cross-Layer Ensemble CorrDet with Adaptive Statistics(CECD-AS), which integrates the detection of faulty SG measurement data as well as inconsistent network inter-arrival times and transmission delays for more reliable and accurate anomaly detection and attack interpretation. Numerical results show that CECD-AS can detect multiple False Data Injections, Denial of Service (DoS) and Man In The Middle (MITM) attacks with a high F1-score compared to current approaches that only use SG measurement data for detection such as the traditional physics-based State Estimation, Ensemble CorrDet with Adaptive Statistics strategy and other machine learning classification-based detection schemes.

cyber-physical security↗

DOE OSTI2022

Trade-off Analysis of Operational Technologies to Advance Cyber Resilience through Automated and Autonomous Response to Threats

The advancement of cyber resilience requires a preliminary stage of characterizing the trade-off space of mitigation options and how these might affect the stability and determinism of an operational technology (OT). This first step will set the stage for the proper cyber-secure and cyber-resilient design and confirm the affects that can be considered and approved by the OT and the security groups. To provide a baseline for this discussion, this paper provides a consideration of the cyberphysical interactions, possible mitigation steps against certain attacks and their corresponding affects that lend to the security design planning and evaluation process. As an integral part of the proposed scheme this work introduces the concept of systemwide fuzzer, i.e., a tool that manipulates the system state in an effort to determine mitigation response sequences that minimize detriments and maximize benefit in accordance with specified operational requirements.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

DOE OSTI2022

NEFTSec: Networked federation testbed for cyber-physical security of smart grid: Architecture, applications, and evaluation

As today's power grid is evolving into a densely interconnected cyber-physical system (CPS), a high fidelity and multifaceted testbed environment is needed to perform cybersecurity experiments in a realistic grid environment. Traditional standalone CPS testbeds lack the ability to emulate complex cyber-physical interdependencies between multiple smart grid domains in a real-time environment. Therefore, there are ongoing research and development (R&D) efforts to develop an interconnected CPS testbed by sharing geographically dispersed testbed resources to perform distributed simulation while analysing simulation fidelity. This paper presents a networked federation testbed for cybersecurity evaluation of today's and emerging smart grid environments. Specifically, it presents two novel testbed architectures, including cyber federation and cyber-physical federation, identifies R&D applications, and also describes testbed building blocks with experimental case studies. It also presents a novel co-simulation interface algorithm to facilitate distributed simulation within cyber-physical federation. The resources available at the PowerCyber CPS security testbed at Iowa State University (ISU) and the US Army Research Laboratory are utilised to develop this platform for performing multiple experimental case studies pertaining to wide-area protection and control applications in power system. Finally, experimental results are presented to analyse the simulation fidelity and real-time performance of the testbed federation.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

DOE OSTI2023

Cyber-Resilient Automatic Generation Control for Systems of AC Microgrids

In this paper we propose a co-design of the secondary frequency regulation in systems of AC microgrids and its cyber security solutions. We term the secondary frequency regulator a Micro-Automatic Generation Control (μ AGC) for highlighting its same functionality as the AGC in bulk power systems. We identify sensory challenges and cyber threats facing the μ AGC. To address the sensory challenges, we introduce a new microgrid model by exploiting the rank-one deficiency property of microgrid dynamics. This model is used to pose an optimal μ AGC control problem that is easily implemented, because it does not require fast frequency measurements. An end-to-end cyber security solution to the False Data Injection (FDI) attack detection and mitigation is developed for the proposed μ AGC. The front-end barrier of applying off-the-shelf algorithms for cyber attack detection is removed by introducing a data-driven modeling approach. Finally, we propose an observer-based corrective control for an islanded microgrid and a collaborative mitigation scheme in systems of AC microgrids. We demonstrate a collaborative role of systems of microgrids during cyber attacks. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed cyber-resilient μ AGC is tested in a system of two networked microgrids.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

DOE OSTI2023

Quantum Key Distribution for Critical Infrastructures: Towards Cyber-Physical Security for Hydropower and Dams

Hydropower facilities are often remotely monitored or controlled from a centralized remote control room. Additionally, major component manufacturers monitor the performance of installed components, increasingly via public communication infrastructures. While these communications enable efficiencies and increased reliability, they also expand the cyber-attack surface. Communications may use the internet to remote control a facility’s control systems, or it may involve sending control commands over a network from a control room to a machine. The content could be encrypted and decrypted using a public key to protect the communicated information. These cryptographic encoding and decoding schemes become vulnerable as more advances are made in computer technologies, such as quantum computing. In contrast, quantum key distribution (QKD) and other quantum cryptographic protocols are not based upon a computational problem, and offer an alternative to symmetric cryptography in some scenarios. Although the underlying mechanism of quantum cryptogrpahic protocols such as QKD ensure that any attempt by an adversary to observe the quantum part of the protocol will result in a detectable signature as an increased error rate, potentially even preventing key generation, it serves as a warning for further investigation. In QKD, when the error rate is low enough and enough photons have been detected, a shared private key can be generated known only to the sender and receiver. We describe how this novel technology and its several modalities could benefit the critical infrastructures of dams or hydropower facilities. The presented discussions may be viewed as a precursor to a quantum cybersecurity roadmap for the identification of relevant threats and mitigation.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

DOE OSTI2022

Computer Science Research Needs for Parallel Discrete Event Simulation (PDES)

Historically, scientific computing efforts have demonstrated the clear need for, and effective use of, supercomputing with traditional time-stepped simulations. Nevertheless, there are several areas in the mission spaces of the U.S. Department of Energy and other agencies waiting to tap advanced computing research using a different, discrete event style of modeling, simulation, and analysis. These span a wide spectrum of applications including energy grid resilience, urban planning and policy, transportation science, building technologies, emergency response and planning, environmental impact analysis, computational epidemiology, Internet communications, cyber security, and cyber-physical systems, to name only a few. Even within traditional scientific applications, the role of discrete event modes of execution is increasing in the form of new event-based mathematical solvers such as quantized state integration methods and discrete-continuous hybrid system solvers. Co-design of advanced supercomputing hardware systems is another area that exploits discrete event simulation at its core for effective analyses. Complex systems, entity behaviors and interconnections play a significant role in all these applications, which are mapped to large-scale models with discrete event formulations. To make advancements in all the aforementioned scientific areas, many technical aspects need to be more thoroughly studied and deeply understood in parallel discrete event simulation (PDES). The unique dynamics inherent in a discrete event modeling approach, by their very nature, intersect and influence the entire stack of the computing system, including (a) the unique nature of the instruction sets exercised in PDES workloads without a predominance of high-precision floating point operations, (b) virtual time-constrained multi-threaded execution of many logical processes per processor, (c) extremely variable and difficult to predict network traffic characteristics, (d) interfaces and inter-dependencies with machine learning and artificial intelligence codes at higher software layers, and (e) highly challenging load balancing needs, especially in effectively accounting for accelerated/extremely heterogeneous computing in current and future high-performance computing systems. Efficient and accurate parallel execution of PDES workloads is also dominated by challenges in dealing with their asynchronous concurrency fundamentally present at the model level. Conservative synchronization, optimistic/speculative synchronization, and their hybrid schemes open new questions in fundamental computer science with respect to reversibility of computation and prediction (lookahead) of behaviors inherent within model codes. On the implementation front, there are relatively few scalable, general-purpose parallel discrete event simulators in the world, and even fewer have been studied on emerging hardware platforms. To enable scientific advances using PDES, the research needs in computer science must also be pursued and met in the intersection of the algorithmic and hardware-aware aspects of scalable PDES engines. This report is aimed at capturing a computer science-oriented view of this important area of research in PDES, presenting a sample of important applications with their inherent discrete event technology elements. Needs are outlined in core areas of parallel discrete event research as well as cross-cutting directions in computer science research that positively impact scientific advancements across several important application areas. A selection of priority research opportunities in advanced computing for PDES is identified to serve as reference for key research topics and their order of importance for scientific advancements.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗