PCS Workshop-June 2005

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* The 4 breakout sessions on June 3rd will cover the following issues:

Interdependencies - In this session, the direct and indirect risks of cyber attack to SCADA systems of the oil and gas sector will be investigated. The session will proceed with identification of SCADA-dependent operations, other internal relevant physical parameters, and its interconnectedness with other critical infrastructures and sectors of the nation. Interdependency effects will be explored in several perspectives: (i) specific oil and gas plants, (ii) local industry sectors, and (iii) regional and national economies. Three major categories of interdependencies will be explored, namely: (i) SCADA-controlled process interdependencies at the plant and corporate levels; (ii) economic sectors that utilize the services provided by the oil and gas infrastructure (i.e., sectors to whom oil and gas infrastructure provide outputs); and (iii) economic sectors that support the recovery of SCADA systems (i.e., sectors from whom oil and gas infrastructure obtain inputs). In addition, the session will cover other infrastructure sectors upon which oil and gas depends, the SCADA systems these interdependent infrastructures use, and the vulnerability these remote SCADA sites pose for oil and gas infrastructure. The discussion will focus on the factors that affect the severity of the consequences of SCADA attacks, such as percentage of reduced productivity, risk of injury to personnel or property, outage/recovery duration, redundancy of failed SCADA element(s), and geographic scope, among others. The affected geographic regions and supply chains will be studied so that a more focused regional economic data can be obtained for the interdependency analysis.

Metrics - SCADA security metrics are necessary to assess a system's or organization's security posture, the associated risk, and support the business case for security investments. This session will explore metrics that might be helpful for managing process control systems in the oil and gas industry. We will discuss information useful for security metrics and determine whether information of that nature is readily available. The following questions will be posed to help develop requirements for metrics: 1) What are the consequences (economic, safety, etc.) of a failure or intrusion of this particular system or subsystem? 2) Are security policies in effect and can verification of those policies be automated? 3) Are any sensors in place that could be utilized to acquire information useful for security metrics? 4) Would it be practical for the industry to implement sensors to provide certain information useful for security metrics? 5) Is available information in a common format or can it be easily converted to a common format? 6) What sort of report/display would integrate well with their current systems?

Inherently Secure SCADA Systems - SCADA systems can be designed, developed, configured and installed securely, but doing so requires expertise applied at many times at many levels, and in many places. In this breakout session we will describe some of the times and places that security needs to be considered, and will discuss some of the security tools that are just starting to be researched by I3P team members. Proposed tools include a tool to eliminate security-relevant software bugs and a SCADA protocol security analyzer; a tool to help design secure operational networks, and a tool to monitor SCADA networks. This is your opportunity to ask security experts about the future of SCADA security, and to offer your opinions and affect research directions for coming SCADA security enhancements.

Information Sharing - The primary goal of this session is to facilitate dialogue among the I3P researchers and the industry participants pertaining to the current and future information sharing needs of the SCADA community. Among other things, we will discuss the requirements for sharing information within and across an organization's SCADA and business networks; the possibilities for information sharing among SCADA operators, and within and across industry sectors; the possibilities for information sharing and collaboration with government and/or civilian authorities (e.g., for the purposes of sharing threat information and/or coordinating emergency response); obstacles to information sharing (e.g., technical, procedural, legal, economic, social/cultural); and measures that could be taken to address these obstacles. Information collected during this breakout session will help kick-off a requirements collection effort. At the conclusion of the requirements collection phase, the team will build initial proof-of-concept solutions targeting one or more of the critical sharing needs of the community. The hope is that through technology transition, the solutions (or commercialized versions of the solutions) can be provided to the SCADA community.