Improving the resiliency of Water Supply Systems to cyber attacks - A case study

To reduce labor costs and increase facility efficiency, modern industrial cyber physical systems and infrastructures encompasses supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) devices, which mainly aim at handling the different components of the infrastructures, managing their orchestration and communication. In the present world where everything is interconnected, and in the context of Industry 4.0, these facilities and their controllers can be the perfect target for cyber attackers. A cyberattack to these facilities can cause economical losses in the order of millions or billions of dollars, and also potential harmful effects on human health. This is particularly true in the case of infrastructures managing critical services for a community, such as water supply systems and power plants. In this context, this thesis focuses on defending critical infrastructures from cyber threats, both in their implementations by integrating SCADA devices with technology specifically designed for cybersecurity applications, and in their designs by proposing guidelines for the inner secure development of the infrastructure of the future. Particular emphasis is put on the investigation of the vulnerabilities of SCADA devices in water supply systems. To better understand the threats and the weakness of this environment, a model of a real water supply system has been designed and then built with the introduction of chemical and physical sensors, actuators and controllers, replicating a realistic scenario and using communication protocols used in real water supply systems. The results achieved show that the introduction on the system of cyber physical devices, as a part of the communication process, increases the resiliency of the entire model but, at the same time, avoids any alteration of the correct functioning.