Petri Net-Based Attack Modeling for Industrial Control System Networks

Industrial control systems have been deeply involved in industrial facilities and infrastructure. With the integrated development of industry and information technology, industrial control systems are tied to the Internet and may be threatened by cyber attacks. Modeling analysis and security evaluation are significant to guarantee industrial control system security. For in-depth research of security in the industrial control network, we first provide a cyber attack strategy for programmable logic controllers with respect to critical nodes in industrial control systems. Then, we explore and validate the viability of attacks based on the proposed strategy through simulations and visualization. Finally, Petri net modeling is utilized to depict both cyber attacks and defensive techniques. The results in this paper demonstrate that the proposed attack strategy gives new ideas for us to investigate industrial control cyber assaults, while the modeling and analytic methodologies in this paper are also useful for system weaknesses analysis.