Teaching ICS Security in Blended Classroom Environment

Demonstration of real industrial equipment, manufacturing processes, and control communication is essential for students of technical universities and colleges to improve their technical competencies and knowledge. To build an industrial control systems (ICS) lab with real hardware and control software usually requires a significant amount of finances. However, the lab equipment is usually accessible only to a limited number of students. A possible alternative is a blended classroom environment that combines real inexpensive devices connected with a configurable simulation environment. In such an environment, groups of students can create their own experiments and observe a near real-life behavior of an ICS system.In this paper we demonstrate how a blended ICS classroom can be built of the Factory I/O 3D software simulator and real UniPi PLC devices equipped with digital and analog inputs. Using such an environment, students may design a set of nontrivial manufacturing scenarios, e.g., a production line, and make experiments with ICS components. The paper presents the topology and equipment of the blended ICS classroom. We also introduce two lab scenarios focused on the security of ICS processes and analysis of Modbus communication in the ICS environment.