A Virtual Environment for Industrial Control Systems

Abstract

The integration of modern information technologies with industrial control systems has created an enormous interest in the security of industrial control, however, given the cost, variety, and industry practices, it is hard for researchers to test and deploy security solutions in real-world systems. Industrial control testbeds can be used as tools to test security solutions before they are deployed, and in this paper we extend our previous work to develop open-source virtual industrial control testbeds where computing and networking components are emulated and virtualized, and the physical system is simulated through differential equations. In particular, we implement a nonlinear control system emulating a three-water tank with the associated sensors, PLCs, and actuators that communicate through an emulated network. In addition, we design unknown input observers (UIO) to not only detect that an attack is occurring, but also to identify the source of the malicious false data injections and mitigate its impact. Our system is available through Github to the academic community.