We are two weeks away from S4. Still time to sign up to be a physical or virtual attendee.

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
• Read the Abstracts from the past three S4 events
• Register for S4

Special thanks to our S4 sponsors this year: OSIsoft and NitroSecurity. Without their help we would not be able to offer the Virtual Attendee option.

Paper Previews
Security protocols for control systems have all of the typical security concerns but they also have very stringent restrictions based on limited processing power and bandwidth. We have two papers that evaluate potential solutions and offer suggestions to address identified problems.

The Protection of Substation Communications
Authors from Cambridge University and ABB Corporate Research teamed to write this paper that analyzes the system requirements and performance of using digital signatures to protect the integrity and provide non-repudiation for substation communication. After providing details and analysis for their case that digital signatures are not a practical solution, the authors propose that symmetric key message authentication codes be used. They discuss two relevant examples where message authentication codes are being used today.

Addressing Unique Control System Concerns in Wireless Networks: Processor Based Denial of Service Attacks and Recovering from Key Compromise
Kun Sun from Intelligent Automation discusses how an attacker could use the computationally intensive public key operations to implement a denial of service attack. He then suggests a cryptographically weaker, but more resistant to DoS attack, method to replace some public key operations. Each node verifies the messages using this weaker method before running the expensive public key operations. Finally he provides a mechanism to rekey a wireless network after key compromise.

Other Previews:

• Keynote Address: Advanced Persistent Threat by Kris Harms of Mandiant
• Security Testing, Vulnerabilities and Exploits in Operating Systems Used in Control System Field Devices
• An Analysis of White Listing Security Solutions and Their Applicability In Control Systems
• Security and Reliability of Wireless LAN Protocol Stacks Used in Control Systems
• Enabling Secure Information Exchange from a Less Secure Zone to Control System Zone in a Critical Infrastructure
• Leveraging Determinism in Industrial Control Systems for Anomaly Detection and Reliable Security Configuration