Towards a Testbed for Critical Industrial Systems: SunSpec Protocol on DER Systems as a Case Study

Control systems in critical infrastructures have usually been considered safe as long as they were totally isolated from the outside world. However, today many of these systems are connected to the outside world and use open and standardized communication protocols designed with little or no security measures, such as Modbus or its variants such as SunSpec, widely used in Distributed Energy Resources (DER) systems. This work-in-progress presents a testbed based on open source tools and docker containers to easily evaluate cybersecurity measures against cyberattacks on critical infrastructures without affecting their availability. This testbed is validated in a use case based on the SunSpec protocol on DER systems to detect person-in-the-middle attacks, and is implemented on a hardware-constrained appliance dubbed Energy Box.