Increasing Visibility of IEC 104 Communication in the Smart Grid

Abstract

Energy systems like smart grids are part of critical infrastructure and their interruption or blackout may have fatal consequences on energy production, distribution, and eventually the life of individual people. In order to secure communication in Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and detect cyber attacks on smart grids, we need<br>to increase visibility of ICS communication so that an operator can see what commands are sent between ICS devices. Security monitoring of ICS transmission requires (i) retrieving monitoring data from ICS packets, (ii) processing and analyzing extracted data, (iii) visualizing the passing communication to the operator. The&nbsp; proposed work presents a concept of ICS flow monitoring system that extracts meta data from ICS packet headers and creates ICS flow records similarly to Netflow/IPFIX system. ICS flows represent communication in the smart grid network that is further visualized using dashboard and communication charts. Unlike traditional monitoring approach that works with network and transport layer data only, we extend flow monitoring to application layer with focus on ICS protocols. The proposed approach is demonstrated on<br>monitoring IEC 60870-5-104 communication.Energy systems like smart grids are part of critical infrastructure and their interruption or blackout may have fatal consequences on energy production, distribution, and eventually the life of individual people. In order to secure communication in Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and detect cyber attacks on smart grids, we need<br>to increase visibility of ICS communication so that an operator can see what commands are sent between ICS devices. Security monitoring of ICS transmission requires (i) retrieving monitoring data from ICS packets, (ii) processing and analyzing extracted data, (iii) visualizing the passing communication to the operator. The&nbsp; proposed work presents a concept of ICS flow monitoring system that extracts meta data from ICS packet headers and creates ICS flow records similarly to Netflow/IPFIX system. ICS flows represent communication in the smart grid network that is further visualized using dashboard and communication charts. Unlike traditional monitoring approach that works with network and transport layer data only, we extend flow monitoring to application layer with focus on ICS protocols. The proposed approach is demonstrated on<br>monitoring IEC 60870-5-104 communication.