Automated Monitoring of Operational Technology Security and Compliance for Power Grids

Abstract

IT security standards can increase trust in a system or component if compliance to the standard can be proven to third parties. Those standards usually specify requirements for security features, which then lead to a certain configuration of an industrial control system. Continuous monitoring of IT security configurations on intelligent electronic devices is difficult because there is no standardised way to query the security configurations of those devices. The objective of this PhD project is to enable automatic querying of security settings from industrial control system in the use case of the power grid infrastructure for remote monitoring. This opens up the possibility of automatically comparing the actual security state on the device against the defined IT security standard configurations. In such cases, industrial control systems that do not comply with defined security standards can thus be identified directly by monitoring systems in the control centre.