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On the Security and Complexity of Periodic Systems

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Abstract

Recent years have seen a tremendous increase in the reliance of industrial systems on a variety of interconnected components ranging in complexity from simple sensors to more complex cyber-physical and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, a class of systems that is often referred to as Industry 4.0 (I4.0). Increased connectivity and the proliferation of insecure components present an opportunity for cyber attacks that could in practice inflect far-reaching damage. We present in this paper a formal modeling and analysis approach of I4.0 applications and their safety and security properties. We introduce formal models of I4.0 applications as automata systems (AS) expressed as theories in Multiset Rewriting (MSR). We also identify different subclasses of AS, reflecting different types of I4.0 requirements, such as periodicity. Furthermore, we model different levels of threats to the system by proposing a range of intruder models based on the number of actions that intruders can use. These models are used to investigate the complexity of two types of problems: functional correctness (safety) and vulnerability to attacks (security). Finally, we demonstrate that periodic systems are amenable to automated verification by describing an executable specification of these models using the rewriting tool Maude and carrying out various experiments.

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Notes

  1. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tkcv-mbhYqk starting at 55 s for a very small scale version of the PnP.

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Acknowledgements

Ban Kirigin is supported in part by the Croatian Science Foundation under the project UIP-05-2017-9219. The work of Max Kanovich was partially supported by EPSRC Programme Grant EP/R006865/1: “Interface Reasoning for Interacting Systems (IRIS).” Nigam is partially supported by NRL grant N0017317-1-G002, and CNPq grant 303909/2018-8. Scedrov was partially supported by the U. S. Office of Naval Research under award number N00014-20-1-2635. Talcott was partially supported by the U. S. Office of Naval Research under award numbers N00014-15-1-2202 and N00014-20-1-2644, and NRL grant N0017317-1-G002.

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Funding support the authors received is as given in the Acknowledgements paragraph above.

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Correspondence to Musab A. Alturki or Tajana Ban Kirigin.

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Code developed for this work is available at https://github.com/SRI-CSL/WrapPat.

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This article is part of the topical collection “Information Systems Security and Privacy” guest edited by Steven Furnell and Paolo Mori.

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Alturki, M.A., Ban Kirigin, T., Kanovich, M. et al. On the Security and Complexity of Periodic Systems. SN COMPUT. SCI. 3, 356 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42979-022-01223-9

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