A Semi-physical Simulation Testbed for Cybersecurity

With a massive influx of cyber threats to SCADA systems, the cybersecurity of critical infrastructures has become one of the most addressed issues. It is impossible to conduct cybersecurity research through injecting attacks into real SCADA system. Therefore, a reliable and efficient testbed is crucial for cybersecurity research. Nowadays, the existing testbeds have some problems, such as high cost, poor portability, and lack adjustability for different attacks. These may not guarantee them to be spread well. To overcome these problems, we propose a semi-physical simulation testbed. The components of the SCADA system and plant are simulated by raspberry 3B in proposed testbed. The communication way among raspberry 3B employs Modbus/Tcp by physical links, which makes attack simulation more realistic. The virtual plant of the proposed testbed corresponds to a boiler-turbine unit. The performances of the boiler-turbine unit in open loop and close loop are verified in the proposed testbed. In addition, few work has been done to verify the impact of attacks on virtual or physical plants to ensure that the testbed accurately simulates a real system. Therefore, we inject the Data modification attack, the Replay attack and the Blocking attack into the proposed testbed to explore their damages on boiler-turbine unit, and verify the reliable of the proposed testbed for simulating attacks.