Recovery scheme for Industrial Control Systems

Industrial Control System (ICS) perform critical role in almost all industries. One important specification of such systems is high availability. Recent attacks to ICS illustrate that almost any cyber attack can be orchestrated on these systems. Current security techniques, tools, and methods cannot prevent these cyber attacks. Attacks may finally lead to malfunctioning or even disabling the ICS for a long time. The consequences are financial loss and in some cases, catastrophic events affecting our lives. Two solutions can improve the availability: increasing the Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) or decreasing the Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR). Current approaches which try to improve the security of ICS use the first solution. Nevertheless, decreasing the MTTR is more effective thus a recovery scheme for ICS is proposed here. Using the proposed scheme, the ICS is recovered from a compromised state and is put into a stable state. Preliminary experiments show that this scheme can significantly decrease the MTTR and improve the ICS availability.