Experimental Methods for Control System Security Research

Abstract

The need for experimental approaches is particularly acute with respect to ICS cyber security. The ability to assess cyber posture, effectiveness, and impact for predictive analysis is predicated on the assumption that operators, users, and others have prior and complete understanding of the effects and impacts caused by cyber adversaries. Obviously, this is often not the case. When compared to the physical world, cyber is quite different, in that it does not follow physical scientific laws; rather, cyber is unbounded because it is a human-made science. As a result, understanding and quantifying effects are still an immature science. Many systems do not lend themselves to closed form mathematical solutions. Thus experimentation becomes a key method of performing analysis of these systems. In order to develop a foundation for identifying and bounding the issues, one approach to this problem is empirically through experimentation, much like physical sciences such as chemistry and physics.