This Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) for SCADA and IT systems workshop brings together a multi-disciplinary team of control, power system, and security experts to discuss areas of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and information technologies (IT). The meeting draws on both academia and industry expertiseto explore new ways to combat the information infrastructure vulnerabilities in industrial and infrastructure control systems.
SCADA and IT communities have traditionally had very little cross-fertilization. For example, SCADA systems traditionally focused on the electronics and hardware solutions to security, whereas IT internet-based security has been predominantly a software discipline. In recent years, SCADA systems, however, are increasingly using software implementations to replace the older hardware systems, making these physical control systems potentially accessible via the Internet. The insertion of maintenance, monitoring, debugging, and repair hooks into SCADA systems for remote maintenance and diagnostics can provide the basis for unauthorized access and security breeches. Since IT has been addressing these breeches for some time, it is expected that those professionals have insights to help SCADA operators. Similarly, the SCADA operators have been designing networks that are robust to failure for some time. The workshop will provide a forum for exploring the relationship of current practice and known weaknesses to the challenges and opportunities that may exist for SCADA systems in the future. The primary goal of this workshop is to identify both the near-term technology solutions and the longer-term research needed to secure and strengthen the U.S. industrial infrastructure.
