Cyberattack Impact Reduction using Software-Defined Networking for Cyber-Physical Production Systems

Cyberattacks on cyber-physical production systems lead to manipulation of the physical process and pose a serious threat to machines and employees. Preventing cyberattacks and reducing their negative impact is an important aspect of security. This paper presents an approach to reduce the impact of cyberattacks. The approach uses software-defined networking (SDN) in combination with network metrics. The network metrics enable measuring the impact of cyberattacks and the impact reduction by the SDN approach. The SDN approach utilizes four different prevention techniques as countermeasures. Scenarios from discrete manufacturing are used to evaluate the approach. The approach reduces the average impact of the selected cyber-attacks from 82.9% to 98.1%.