Title: Design and Implementation of a Cyber-Physical Systems Cyber Defense Competition
Abstract: Experts in the cyber-physical security have been saying for some time that our electrical power grids are vulnerable to cyber attack. On December 23rd, 2015, a power outage occurred that left half of the Ivano-Frankivsh region of Ukraine without power [1]. Later it was revealed that this outage was caused not by equipment malfunction, but rather by a cyber attack.
Cyber security has become an increasing concern for businesses and other organizations who are dependent on computer systems for their business. For the past 10 years, Iowa State University has hosted Cyber Defense Competitions (CDCs) to train the next generation of cyber security professionals to defend computer systems against cyber attack. These competitions in the past have focused on standard corporate IT systems that you would find in any business: email servers, web applications, database servers, etc. To address the increased concern that cyber attacks can be used to cause kinetic impacts, we have created the first ever Cyber-Physical Systems Cyber Defense Competition (CPS-CDC).
This CPS-CDC was possible because of two key developments to the existing competition infrastructure. The first new development was to create a system that was capable of simulating events in the physical world. This is why CIMoRE, the Critical Infrastructure Modeling and Response Environment, was created. The second development was to decide on a communication protocol to be the standard SCADA protocol within our environment. Our choice, OPC-XML, is a simple, high-level communication protocol that is used in many industrial control system application.