On the analysis of vulnerability chains in industrial networks

The ever-increasing adoption at the factory field level of COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) hardware and software to host both real-time control tasks and a general-purpose operating system on the same machine is profoundly influencing the extent of threats that a factory network and computing infrastructure shall be prepared to deal with. In fact, these machines share with their office automation counterparts the same kinds of vulnerabilities and, being often interconnected to computers providing services to the public, are prone to cyber-attacks. In this paper, the architecture and use of a software tool able to analyse a factory network for vulnerabilities are described. Automating the analysis is of outmost importance because, as the complexity of the network grows, the problem rapidly becomes hard to tackle by hand due to the subtle interactions that may occur among apparently unrelated vulnerabilities.