Safety Graph: When Safety Responses Become Attack Surfaces in Cyber-Physical Systems
Researchers introduce Safety Graph to model how ICS safety responses create new IT-OT lateral-movement paths.
The paper presents Safety Graph, a formal framework that unifies attack graphs, fault trees, and event trees over a shared propositional state space to capture bidirectional IT-OT cascades in industrial control systems. Safety responses meant to mitigate operational-technology failures can open new attack surfaces and enable lateral movement into the IT layer. The authors compile Safety Graph to a classical AI planning problem and search with A* on a Web3D simulation of the Tennessee Eastman chemical process. The method finds safety-response-induced cascade paths and barriers that existing cyber-to-physical models miss.
- Safety Graph unifies attack graphs, fault trees, and event trees.
- Safety responses can enable new IT-layer lateral movement.
- Compiled to classical planning and searched with A*.
- Demonstrated on a Tennessee Eastman plant simulation.
From the original article
1 min read at arxiv.orgModern industrial control systems (ICS) are susceptible to cyber attacks triggering safety failures in the operational technology (OT) layer. The traditional way to mitigate any failure in OT is to implement safety responses. However, we show in this work that these responses can open up new attack surfaces, thereby vastly expanding the scope of lateral movement.
By Rakesh Podder · arxiv.org
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