Modeling cyber-Attacks on industrial control systems

Despite the prevalence of markets for malware and exploits and their potential threat to industrial control systems (ICS), existing paradigms for modeling of such cyber-Adversarial behavior do not account for the complex nature of ICS systems consisting of multiple interconnected components. This paper takes the first steps toward addressing this need. Here, we introduce a framework that allows for modeling of ICS systems with highly interconnected components and study this model through the lens of lattice theory. We then turn our attention to the problem of determining the optimal/most dangerous for a cyber-Adversary with respect to this model and find it to be an NP-Complete problem. To address this complexity, we utilize an A∗-based approach and develop admissible heuristics. We provide an implementation and show through a suite of experiments using both simulated and actual vulnerability data that this method performs well in practice for identifying adversarial courses of action in this domain.