Cybersecurity of Industrial Systems

Introduction

I.1. What is industrial cybersecurity?

Nowadays, more and more man-made physical systems are controlled by a computer system. This is the case for autonomous systems such as vehicles, everyday devices and industrial production systems or water or energy distribution systems. Most of these systems are also connected in some way to the Internet.

The computer security of this equipment is becoming a major issue for the industrial world. This is particularly true today, in the context of the factory of the future, also known as Industry 4.0, which is presented as the fourth industrial revolution, and which is characterized by increasingly connected systems and by the increasingly strong integration of digital technologies into manufacturing processes.

There are many spectacular cyber-attacks in the news: they aim to steal identifiers, make some systems or websites unable to function properly, or try to block workstations by encrypting data in order to obtain a ransom.

The control systems of industrial installations are also subject to attacks, either by the collateral effect of a computer attack, as in the case of WannaCry (Symantec 2017; May et al. 2018), which can lead to plant shutdown and significant operating losses, or specifically with an attack on industrial systems. This is the case with the Stuxnet attack (Falliere et al. 2011), which aimed to destroy uranium production capacities in Iran, or the Triton attack (White 2017), which aimed to render security ...