I’m thrilled to announce Digital Bond has received a research grant from DHS to pursue our investigation of Intrusion Detection and Security Monitoring of SCADA Networks. It is a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract from the Homeland Security Advanced Research Project Agency (HSARPA).

Loyal readers of this blog know this is an area of high interest, and we believe has high potential to significantly increase the security of SCADA networks. We will be soliciting input from leading SCADA and field device vendors, SCADA users, and MSSPs. A number of you have already been in touch with me, but it is not too late for anyone else who is interested to get involved.

You will be getting regular updates via the blog, but here are the highlights of the project:

1) Develop a SCADA signature set for the SNORT IDS. (Note this is open source so the price is right for users)

2) Develop a GUI or other easy means for users to personalize the SCADA signature set for a particular system

3) Create a context and class mechanism to pull the valuable security events out of SCADA application logs (This is so MSSPs or in house 24×7 monitoring can use this very valuable information)

Phase I will create the requirements and design specifications as well as a proof of concept. Phase II would include the development and trial deployment of these components.