Securing SCADA and control networks using open standard solutions
An article written by Scott Howard - Technical Sales Manager at Tofino Security highlights open standard solutions combined with the Tofino Industrial Security Solution to secure SCADA and industrial control networks.
indicates articles that contain news about Tofino Security, the Tofino Industrial Security Solution or that contain quotes from Eric Byres.
Securing SCADA and Control Networks
Automationworld.com, June 2010
Early SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) and control networks consisted primarily of isolated islands of proprietary hardware and software. In recent years however, the availability of control equipment based on open standards such as Ethernet, TCP/IP and Windows PC has led to an explosion in the complexity and ‘interconnectedness’ of these systems. Tremendous improvements in plant performance and productivity have been realized through these changes; however, these productivity gains will not continue in the future without corresponding security improvements in these systems. In addition, safety-critical plants such as chemical, power, and oil and gas facilities can put human safety at risk if their control networks are not properly secured.
Vulnerable 'soft' targets abound in these networks. PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers) are optimized for high-performance real-time I/O, not robust networking. Many of these devices will crash if they receive malformed data packets, or even high rates of correctly formed data, from the network. This was the root cause of an incident at the Browns Ferry nuclear power plant in Alabama in August 2006. Excessive traffic on the control network caused both the primary and backup reactor cooling systems to crash, necessitating a manual shutdown to keep the reactor core within safe operating limits.