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Towards High-Interaction Virtual ICS Honeypots-in-a-Box

Published: 28 October 2016 Publication History

Abstract

In this work, we address the problem of designing and implementing honeypots for Industrial Control Systems (ICS). Honeypots are vulnerable systems that are set up with the intent to be probed and compromised by attackers. Analysis of those attacks then allows the defender to learn about novel attacks and general strategy of the attacker. Honeypots for ICS systems need to satisfy both traditional ICT requirements, such as cost and maintainability, and more specific ICS requirements, such as time and determinism.
We propose the design of a virtual, high-interaction and server-based ICS honeypot to satisfy the requirements, and the deployment of a realistic, cost-effective, and maintainable ICS honeypot. An attacker model is introduced to complete the problem statement and requirements.
Based on our design and the MiniCPS framework, we implemented a honeypot mimicking a water treatment testbed. To the best of our knowledge, the presented honeypot implementation is the first academic work targeting Ethernet/IP based ICS honeypots, the first ICS virtual honeypot that is high-interactive without the use of full virtualization technologies (such as a network of virtual machines), and the first ICS honeypot that can be managed with a Software-Defined Network (SDN) controller.

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Cited By

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  • (2025)PHCG: PLC Honeypoint Communication Generator for Industrial IoTIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2024.345556424:1(198-209)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2025
  • (2024)Observation of Human-Operated Accesses Using Remote Management Device HoneypotIEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences10.1587/transfun.2023CIP0018E107.A:3(291-305)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2024
  • (2024)"If You Build it, They will Come" - A Blueprint for ICS-focused Capture-The-Flag CompetitionsProceedings of the Sixth Workshop on CPS&IoT Security and Privacy10.1145/3690134.3694818(27-40)Online publication date: 19-Nov-2024
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cover image ACM Conferences
CPS-SPC '16: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Workshop on Cyber-Physical Systems Security and Privacy
October 2016
144 pages
ISBN:9781450345682
DOI:10.1145/2994487
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 28 October 2016

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Author Tags

  1. cyber-physical systems
  2. honeypots
  3. industrial control systems
  4. se- curity

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CPS-SPC '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 12 of 26 submissions, 46%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 53 of 66 submissions, 80%

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Cited By

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  • (2025)PHCG: PLC Honeypoint Communication Generator for Industrial IoTIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2024.345556424:1(198-209)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2025
  • (2024)Observation of Human-Operated Accesses Using Remote Management Device HoneypotIEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences10.1587/transfun.2023CIP0018E107.A:3(291-305)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2024
  • (2024)"If You Build it, They will Come" - A Blueprint for ICS-focused Capture-The-Flag CompetitionsProceedings of the Sixth Workshop on CPS&IoT Security and Privacy10.1145/3690134.3694818(27-40)Online publication date: 19-Nov-2024
  • (2024)ICSNet: A Hybrid-Interaction Honeynet for Industrial Control SystemsProceedings of the Sixth Workshop on CPS&IoT Security and Privacy10.1145/3690134.3694813(68-79)Online publication date: 19-Nov-2024
  • (2024)These are Not the PLCs You are Looking for: Obfuscating PLCs to Mimic HoneypotsIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2024.336191521:3(3623-3635)Online publication date: Jun-2024
  • (2024) HoneyJudge : A PLC Honeypot Identification Framework Based on Device Memory Testing IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security10.1109/TIFS.2024.340752019(6028-6043)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)Towards Cyber-Physical Representation and Cyber-Resilience Against Attack and Failure within a Hydraulic Network Simulation Toolkit2024 IEEE Security and Privacy Workshops (SPW)10.1109/SPW63631.2024.00029(246-252)Online publication date: 23-May-2024
  • (2024)DRACO: Production Network Deployment and Evaluation of Deceptive Defense As-a-Service2024 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData)10.1109/BigData62323.2024.10825309(2606-2615)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2024
  • (2024)Scrutinizing Security in Industrial Control Systems: An Architectural Vulnerabilities and Communication Network PerspectiveIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.339484812(67537-67573)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)CyberDefender: an integrated intelligent defense framework for digital-twin-based industrial cyber-physical systemsCluster Computing10.1007/s10586-024-04320-x27:6(7273-7306)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2024
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