Volume 20 No 9 (2022)
Download PDF
Identifying Vulnerabilities in Industrial Control System Protocols using Mutation-based Fuzzing
Aditi P. Thakur, Bharati A. Dixit
Abstract
As we are heading towards the future of technological developments, we see that industrial automation
is getting to the forefront. The combination of information and operation technology is making
remarkable wonders. But the price to be paid for this revolution is the security of old mechanisms as they
were not built to work with such advanced systems. Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) are being
used in the industry to control field devices for a long time now. These devices tend to be easy targets for
cyber-attacks. Stuxnet and Triton are well-known examples of PLCs being compromised. Many of those
PLCs are still working on the proprietary protocols. Through this research, we try to acknowledge the
security risks of such proprietary protocols. These protocols are being used by many devices which
support ethernet connectivity. We develop a plugin that consists of two utilities: packet sniffer and
fuzzing section. The sniffer is used to analyze packets. It studies various header fields which can become
a target for manipulation. The information gathered using this sniffer is then fed to the fuzzing section to
perform a fuzz test. We implement the mutation-based fuzzing approach to study various security
aspects of these protocols. Using this plugin we can study various security risks possessed by protocols.
This will further help in securing the communication channels in industrial control systems.
Keywords
PLC, SCADA, ICS Security, Fuzzing, ICS Protocols
Copyright
Copyright © Neuroquantology
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Articles published in the Neuroquantology are available under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives Licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Authors retain copyright in their work and grant IJECSE right of first publication under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Users have the right to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles in this journal, and to use them for any other lawful purpose.