Designing Secure SCADA Systems Using Security Patterns

Critical infrastructure systems are those systems that support our daily lives and their protection is fundamental. The key component of a critical infrastructure system is the process control system, also known as the supervisory, control, and data acquisition (SCADA) system. On the other hand, security patterns are used to analyze, construct and evaluate secure systems. This paper proposes methods to build a secure SCADA system using security patterns. We study the architecture of a general SCADA system and analyze the potential attacks against it, then we use security patterns as a tool to design a secure SCADA system that is resistant to these attacks. We believe our research work lays a new direction for research on secure SCADA systems.