Improving Software and Data Security in Industrial Control Systems

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are critical elements in electrical, water, oil/gas, and manufacturing services involving supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), distributed control systems (DCS), and programmable logic controllers (PLCs). These systems allow operators to monitor sensor data and remotely control field devices. Initially, these devices were designed for closed-network or non-networked environments inside of physically secure facilities. These early systems did not take into account cyber threats such as viruses, worms, Trojans, and system exploitations from buffer overflows, logic errors, network protocols, and denial of service (DOS) attacks. However, ICS have evolved into highly technical distributed systems directly and indirectly connected to the Internet where they are exposed to cyber attacks. Pikewerks proposes to research and develop a system for protecting the software executing on these systems without requiring any changes to the source code.