Towards PLC-Specific Binary Analysis Tools: An Investigation of Codesys-Compiled PLC Software Applications

Hadjer Benkraouda, Anand Agrawal, Dimitrios Tychalas, Marios Sazos, Michail Maniatakos

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Critical infrastructures are controlled by industrial control systems. Such systems are primarily operated by Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC). In recent years, PLC vendors have been moving towards commercial-off-The-shelf components and operating systems, a trend that has decreased development and maintenance costs. It also had the side-effect of exposing these devices to a wider range of attacks. Previous research has focused on securing the network and monitoring its traffic. PLC software applications though, the programs that run on PLCs, have not been subject to diligent security analysis. This can be attributed to the proprietary nature of PLC compilers and the unique format of the PLC software binaries. Therefore, in this work we aim to closely study a PLC compiler (Codesys) that is used by more that 250 devices, including Siemens, Mitsubishi, and Schneider Electric devices. To this end, we created a varied dataset of 600 in-house programs comprised of basic operations developed in different PLC languages and spanning different architectures, Codesys compiler versions, and PLC hardware vendors. Our dataset also contains binaries for real-world systems. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive dataset of PLC programs aimed at exploring the compiler behavior.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCPSIoTSec 2023 - Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on CPS and IoT Security and Privacy
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages83-89
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9798400702549
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 26 2023
Event5th Workshop on CPS and IoT Security and Privacy, CPSIoTSec 2023 - Copenhagen, Denmark
Duration: Nov 26 2023 → …

Publication series

NameCPSIoTSec 2023 - Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on CPS and IoT Security and Privacy

Conference

Conference5th Workshop on CPS and IoT Security and Privacy, CPSIoTSec 2023
Country/TerritoryDenmark
CityCopenhagen
Period11/26/23 → …

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications

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