A framework to assess impacts of cyber attacks in manufacturing

Recent trends in manufacturing and industry accelerate the interconnection of industrial control systems between each other and over public networks. This brings an increase of cyber attack impact with it as the number of potential targets rises and the consequences of the attacks gain in severity. In order to build secure manufacturing systems, it is paramount to measure the possible impact of cyber attacks. This is required to evaluate security controls towards their effectiveness in attack scenarios. In this work, a proposal for an impact assessment framework in manufacturing is given. A suitable attacker model for execution of the attacks is provided. An evaluation metric for quantifying attack impact on manufacturing systems is developed. A light-weight modeling technique is presented and used to study the impact of cyber attacks on a cellular assembly setup. Different attack scenarios are implemented and simulated within the framework. The simulations provide detailed insight and illustrate attack impact.