Practical cybersecurity for protection and control system communications networks

This paper explains practical design principles to follow for networked protection and control systems. Proven cybersecurity best practices, system architectures, monitoring methods, and defense-in-depth techniques are described. The risks and proper mitigations are explained for many common problems, such as human error, malicious malware, and advanced nation-state zero-day attacks. The paper references and summarizes several industry standards. These insights come from the authors' design, installation, and support of dozens of operational protection and control systems. The paper is written so that a protection or control engineer with minimal network experience can easily relate to all concepts.