EGIFM - Extendable Gateway and Industrial Firewall for ModBus
EGIFM - Extendable Gateway and Industrial Firewall for ModBus

Summary/Abstract: In Ukraine, December 2015, took place one successful cyberattack on a power grid. Hackers were able to compromise the information systems of three energy distribution companies leaving about 230 thousand people without electricity for several hours. Industrial equipment used in factories, refineries, power plant stations and in other automation facilities have a service life of tens of years. In many working power plants and other automation devices and infrastructures designed in the 80's are still being used. Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition(SCADA) systems are based on standard industrial protocols to control and gather data from the on-field devices (sensors, stations, drives, robots, controllers, etc.). With the spreading of the Internet in industrial facilities, new technologies and possibilities have arisen, gluing together the robustness of the automation equipment with the remote control and visualization offered by the internet, enhancing SCADA systems and allowing remote monitorization and control of different infrastructures. Together with the technologies came more advanced threats aimed at the devices and SCADA systems connected to the internet. SCADA systems can become a point of vulnerability when connected to a cyber environment and current security solutions are not designed nor targeted for protecting these industrial infrastructures Modern industrial equipment is controlled using protocols designed decades ago that do not implement any security features. One of the most used protocols in industrial equipment is Modbus. Our solution, EIGFM addresses the Modbus vulnerabilities that permitted the attack by filtering and encrypting the packages with little changes on the network and equipment, especially on software level. We have tested our device showing the power consumption is lower than 3W and that it is capable of filtering Modbus packets based on a configurable ruleset.

• Details
• Contents