ICS-Sniper: A Targeted Blackhole Attack on Encrypted ICS Traffic

Abstract

Modern industrial control systems (ICS) increasingly host their Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) services in the cloud to reduce the costs of large-scale automation. To protect site-SCADA communications, ICS operators commonly use VPN tunneling and standard security practices. We show that, despite these security measures, an on-path Internet adversary can disrupt ICS operations without infiltrating the ICS perimeter, breaking encryption, or knowledge of the control logic. We present ICS-Sniper, a targeted blackhole attack that analyzes the VPN traffic metadata (sizes, direction, timing of packets) to identify narrow time windows, called critical superperiods, during which the site-SCADA traffic would likely contain highly critical commands or data. Post-analysis, in a subsequent operational cycle, ICS-Sniper drops a small set of payload-carrying packets in the critical superperiods to disrupt the ICS's operations. We demonstrate three attacks on two realistic modern Secure Water Treatment (SWaT) plant testbeds that can potentially violate the operational safety of the ICS while evading state-of-the-art ICS attack detectors.

18 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables