I will be previewing some of the papers and presentations in this year’s S4 over the next few weeks.

Digital Bond’s 4th Annual SCADA Security Scientific Symposium [S4] is being held January 20 – 21 in warm and sunny Miami Beach. S4 is a bleeding edge research event where technical papers are presented in detail to a technical audience. It is not for everyone. There are no best practice papers, standards or gov program overviews, policy or SCADA 101 presentations. But if you are craving some technical meat down to the byte, protocol, metric/mathematics, exploit, … level and want to talk to other technical and thought leaders, you should consider S4.

• See the detailed S4 agenda
• See the Advanced Training Course: Using and Customizing SCADA Security Tools
• Read the Abstracts from the past three S4 events
• Register for S4

Preview Paper: An Analysis of White Listing Security Solutions and Their Applicability In Control Systems

White listing solutions are being targeted at the control system space as both an augmentation to and replacement for anti-virus. The fit is intriguing because of the relatively static or unchanging nature of control system workstations and servers as compared to traditional corporate or business networks. Adding fuel to this discussion is the growing disillusionment with anti-virus effectiveness due to things like the race to zero.

The problem is vendor presentations at conferences and other events almost always get negative comments and low scores because of the feeling of a sales pitch. Our solution: have an independent third party analysis a number of white listing solutions.

Andrew Ginter, CTO, and the team at Industrial Defender evaluated a number of white listing solutions for their applicability to control systems and then against each other for comparison purposes. I’m very eager to see this paper and have no idea what data they have or conclusions they have drawn.

Other Previews:

• Security Testing, Vulnerabilities and Exploits in Operating Systems Used in Control System Field Devices