A Standalone Gray-Box EtherCAT Fuzzer

SCADA systems have been introduced in 1960s. In 1990s, it is widely accepted because of its architecture, topology, effortless network infrastructure construction and real-time support. Nowadays, modern SCADA systems providing open distributed architecture, redundancy, industry standards, distributed functions and TCP/IP communication are used as de facto. SCADA is mostly applied in machine, building, process, energy, water/waste industry of the Industrial Control System (ICS). In order to meet with the needs of ICS, new protocols supplying Ethernet over communication such as Modbus/TCP, Profinet, Sercos III and EtherCAT have been introduced. Among these protocols, Ethernet based EtherCAT protocol has broad application fields mostly in machine and building automation. However, EtherCAT is open to cyber threats as other Ethernet based protocols. This paper examines the field level of EtherCAT communication and introduces the gray-box EtherCAT fuzzer in order to detect vulnerabilities on partially known target systems. The results confirm that the proposal helps to identify unknown vulnerabilities and satisfies the requirement of vulnerability detection of EtherCAT on platform independent.