On the Feasibility of Generating Deception Environments for Industrial Control Systems

The cyber threat landscape is a constantly morphing surface; the need for cyber defenders to develop and create proactive threat intelligence is on the rise, especially on critical infrastructure environments. It is commonly voiced that Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems and Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are vulnerable to the same classes of threats as other networked computer systems. However, cyber defense in operational ICS is difficult, often introducing unacceptable risks of disruption to critical physical processes. This is exacerbated by the notion that hardware used in ICS is often expensive, making full-scale mock-up systems for testing and/or cyber defense impractical. New paradigms in cyber security have focused heavily on using deception to not only protect assets, but also gather insight into adversary motives and tools. Much of the work that we see in today's literature is focused on creating deception environments for traditional IT enterprise networks; however, leveraging our prior work in the domain, we explore the opportunities, challenges and feasibility of doing deception in ICS networks.