SecureRails: Towards an open simulation platform for analyzing cyber-physical attacks in railways

Analyzing the impact of cyber-physical attacks is important for railway operators to help them in assessing and prioritizing their efforts of securing the infrastructures. Since railways consist of several complex cyber-physical systems operating in tandem, it is difficult to assess the impact of an attack without a simulator. Commercially available simulators are intended to support operational design and lack the flexibility to incorporate different attack scenarios. Furthermore, many commercial tools are prohibitively expensive. To address the need for an open and extensible simulator, we propose to build SecureRails, an open source simulator for railway cyber-security analysis. SecureRails consists of two basic building blocks, a train motion simulator built on OpenRails platform, and a model based railway traction power flow simulator built on Matlab. In order to simulate the operation of a railway system, the two simulators interact with each other continuously during their simulation runtime using the JSON-RPC protocol. We have included several novel features in this simulator such as improving the timetable schedule and passenger flow modeling. We propose to develop a generic API framework on OpenRails and Matlab to allow users to specify their attack scenarios and call these APIs for their studies. While this work is in an early stage, we illustrate the utility of such a simulator using a case study for the Shenzhen metro system.