Formal Security Analysis of Cloud-Connected Industrial Control Systems

Industrial control systems are changing from isolated to remotely accessible cloud-connected architectures. Despite their advantages, these architectures introduce extra complexity, which makes it more difficult to ensure the security of these systems prior to deployment. One way to address this is by using formal methods to reason about the security properties of these systems during the early stages of development. Specifically, by analyzing security attacks and verifying that the corresponding mitigation strategies work as intended. In this paper, we present a formal framework for security analysis of cloud-connected industrial control systems. We consider several well-known attack scenarios and formally verify mitigation strategies for each of them. Our framework is mechanized using TLA+ in order to enable formal verification of security properties. Finally we demonstrate the applicability of our work using an industrial case study.

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