CENTER Water: A Secure Testbed Infrastructure Proposal For Waste and Potable Water Management

Due to Industrial Control System (ICS)’s critical location, any compromise in their security can have serious consequences. The resilience of ICSs has become a crucial concern to administrators and governments following widely publicized cybersecurity incidents. The inability to apply traditional Information Technology (IT) security practice to ICSs further compounds challenges in adequately securing critical systems. Therefore, there is a need to have a SCADA testbed for checking vulnerabilities and validating security solutions. This paper presents a secure testbed infrastructure for waste and potable water management. The testbed is established under the critical infrastructures national testbed center (CENTER) for training, security research, and attack/defense analysis/tests. Waste and potable water processes support multiple ICS protocols such as DNP3, S7, EtherCAT, Modbus. Each station in the processes is autonomously controlled by local RTUs/PLCs and secured by firewalls with a segregated network. Alternative applications can be made by selecting scenarios with the developed SCADA applications. Also, it provides a robust experimental environment due to its features such as monitoring of both systems, logging, cyber-attack detection.