Moving Target Defense Based on Adaptive Forwarding Path Migration for Securing the SCADA Network

Abstract

Static characteristics of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system are often exploited to perform malicious activities on smart grids. Most of the time, the success of cyberattacks begins with the profiling of the target system and follows by the analysis of the limited resources. To alleviate the asymmetry between attack and defense, network-based moving target defense (MTD) techniques have been applied in the network system to defend against cyberattacks by constructing a dynamic attack surface to the adversary. In this paper, we propose a novel MTD technique based on adaptive forwarding path migration (AFPM) that focuses on improving the defense capability and optimizing the network performance of path mutation. Considering the transient problems present in path mutation caused by the dynamic switching of the forwarding path, we formalize the mutation constraints based on the satisfiability modulo theory (SMT) to select the mutation path. Considering the limited defense capability of path mutation owing to the traditional mutation selection mechanism, we design the mutation path generation algorithm based on the network security capacity matrix to obtain an optimal combination of mutation path and mutation period. Finally, we compare and analyze various cyber defense techniques used in the SCADA network and demonstrate experimentally that our MTD technique can prevent more than 92% of passive monitoring under specified conditions while ensuring the quality of service (QoS) to be almost the same as the static network.