Case Studies of SCADA Firewall Configurations and the Implications for Best Practices

Firewall configuration is an important activity for any modern day business. It is particularly a critical task for the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) networks that control power stations, water distribution, factory automation, etc. Lack of automation tools to assist with this critical task has resulted in unoptimised, error prone configurations that expose these networks to cyber attacks. Automation can make designing firewall configurations more reliable and their deployment increasingly cost-effective. Best practices have been proposed by the industry for developing high-level security policy (e.g., ANSI/ISA 62443-1-1). But these best practices lack specification in several key aspects needed to allow a firewall to be automatically configured. For instance, the standards are vague on how firewall management policies should be captured at a high-level using its specifications. In this paper, we uncover these missing pieces and propose extensions. We apply our extended best-practice specification to real-world firewall case studies to achieve multiple objectives: 1) to evaluate the usefulness of the refined best-practice in the automated specification of firewalls and 2) to illustrate that even in simple cases, SCADA networks are often insecure due to their misconfigured firewalls.