Recommended Practice: Creating Cyber Forensics Plans for Control Systems

Cornelius, Eric ; Fabro, Mark

Idaho National Laboratory

关键词: Security;    Monitoring;    Maintenance;    Forensics, Control Systems, Cyber Security, Event;    Crime;   

DOI  :  10.2172/944209
RP-ID  :  INL/EXT-08-14231
RP-ID  :  DE-AC07-99ID-13727
RP-ID  :  944209

美国|英语

来源: UNT Digital Library

【 摘 要 】

Cyber forensics has been in the popular mainstream for some time, and has matured into an information-technology capability that is very common among modern information security programs. The goal of cyber forensics is to support the elements of troubleshooting, monitoring, recovery, and the protection of sensitive data. Moreover, in the event of a crime being committed, cyber forensics is also the approach to collecting, analyzing, and archiving data as evidence in a court of law. Although scalable to many information technology domains, especially modern corporate architectures, cyber forensics can be challenging when being applied to non-traditional environments, which are not comprised of current information technologies or are designed with technologies that do not provide adequate data storage or audit capabilities. In addition, further complexity is introduced if the environments are designed using proprietary solutions and protocols, thus limiting the ease of which modern forensic methods can be utilized. The legacy nature and somewhat diverse or disparate component aspects of control systems environments can often prohibit the smooth translation of modern forensics analysis into the control systems domain. Compounded by a wide variety of proprietary technologies and protocols, as well as critical system technologies with no capability to store significant amounts of event information, the task of creating a ubiquitous and unified strategy for technical cyber forensics on a control systems device or computing resource is far from trivial. To date, no direction regarding cyber forensics as it relates to control systems has been produced other than what might be privately available from commercial vendors. Current materials have been designed to support event recreation (event-based), and although important, these requirements do not always satisfy the needs associated with incident response or forensics that are driven by cyber incidents. To address these issues and to accommodate for the diversity in both system and architecture types, a framework based in recommended practices to address forensics in the control systems domain is required. This framework must be fully flexible to allow for deployment into any control systems environment regardless of technologies used. Moreover, the framework and practices must provide for direction on the integration of modern network security technologies with traditionally closed systems, the result being a true defense-in-depth strategy for control systems architectures. This document takes the traditional concepts of cyber forensics and forensics engineering and provides direction regarding augmentation for control systems operational environments. The goal is to provide guidance to the reader with specifics relating to the complexity of cyber forensics for control systems, guidance to allow organizations to create a self-sustaining cyber forensics program, and guidance to support the maintenance and evolution of such programs. As the current control systems cyber security community of interest is without any specific direction on how to proceed with forensics in control systems environments, this information product is intended to be a first step.