The Current State of Fingerprinting in Operational Technology Environments

Observing the increase in cybersecurity attacks on our nation's and even world's critical infrastructures, heightens the priority need for being proactive in detecting possible intrusions. Each endpoint that connects information technology to operational technology is a vulnerability endpoint. Identification of these endpoints is the first step in fortifying the critical infrastructure. Sadly, most entities do not have a complete blueprint of their system's network. This is why the introduction of network fingerprinting arose. This initial step of our research discusses networking fingerprinting as a tool to identify components of a critical infrastructure, outlines previous work and identifies some network fingerprinting tools. The work shows that fingerprinting and operational technology (OT) asset identification is still woefully lacking in its ability and suggests possible future improvements.