Looking at a Moving Target Defense of EthernetIP

SCADA and other industrial control systems have been successfully attacked and likely will continue to be attacked. These systems use many different, often proprietary, network application protocols for communications. Our research looks at applying a moving target defense (MTD) to an unsecured ethernetIP protocol used for communicating to a programable logic controller. Using this as a proxy for those protocols transmitted in the clear over TCP, we experiment with choosing various methods of encryption at random and periodically changing the scheme while keeping the system in motion, thus introducing a moving target defense of the protocol. Real time systems generally have deterministic timing requirements. Our research indicates that it may be possible to increase security with MTD of the underlying fieldbus protocol while maintaining deterministic temporal requirements suitable for some environments.