TY - GEN
T1 - Process-Aware cyberattacks for thermal desalination plants
AU - Rajput, Prashant
AU - Rajput, Pankaj
AU - Sazos, Marios
AU - Maniatakos, Michail
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was carried out in the Center for Cyber Security at New York University Abu Dhabi and was supported by the NYU Abu Dhabi Global PhD Fellowship program. We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Chengyu Song (UC Riverside) for their valuable feedback.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
PY - 2019/7/2
Y1 - 2019/7/2
N2 - In 2017, desalination industry was contracted to produce 99.8 million m3/d of fresh water globally. In regions with a natural shortage of fresh water, desalination contributes up to 70% of drinking water. While state-of-the-art research has focused on securing the power grid, water treatment plants, and other critical infrastructure, not much attention has been given towards desalination plants. In this work, we perform interdisciplinary cyber threat analysis on a desalination plant model, presenting cyberattacks and analyzing their effect on the plant performance and equipment both from economics and mechanical engineering perspective. Our analysis shows that cyber actors can perform extensive financial damage by affecting the performance of the plant. We also perform control volume analysis and finite element analysis studies to investigate the possibility of Stuxnet-like attacks with the potential to cause mechanical damage and equipment failure.
AB - In 2017, desalination industry was contracted to produce 99.8 million m3/d of fresh water globally. In regions with a natural shortage of fresh water, desalination contributes up to 70% of drinking water. While state-of-the-art research has focused on securing the power grid, water treatment plants, and other critical infrastructure, not much attention has been given towards desalination plants. In this work, we perform interdisciplinary cyber threat analysis on a desalination plant model, presenting cyberattacks and analyzing their effect on the plant performance and equipment both from economics and mechanical engineering perspective. Our analysis shows that cyber actors can perform extensive financial damage by affecting the performance of the plant. We also perform control volume analysis and finite element analysis studies to investigate the possibility of Stuxnet-like attacks with the potential to cause mechanical damage and equipment failure.
KW - Cyber security
KW - Desalination
KW - Finite element analysis
KW - Industrial control systems
KW - Process aware attacks
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U2 - 10.1145/3321705.3329805
DO - 10.1145/3321705.3329805
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85069965262
T3 - AsiaCCS 2019 - Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security
SP - 441
EP - 452
BT - AsiaCCS 2019 - Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - 2019 ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security, AsiaCCS 2019
Y2 - 9 July 2019 through 12 July 2019
ER -