EPIC: A Testbed for Scientifically Rigorous Cyber-Physical Security Experimentation

Recent malware, like Stuxnet and Flame, constitute a major threat to Networked Critical Infrastructures (NCIs), e.g., power plants. They revealed several vulnerabilities in today's NCIs, but most importantly they highlighted the lack of an efficient scientific approach to conduct experiments that measure the impact of cyber threats on both the physical and the cyber parts of NCIs. In this paper we present EPIC, a novel cyber-physical testbed and a modern scientific instrument that can provide accurate assessments of the effects that cyber-attacks may have on the cyber and physical dimensions of NCIs. To meet the complexity of today's NCIs, EPIC employs an Emulab-based testbed to recreate the cyber part and multiple software simulators for the physical part. Its main advantage is that it can support very accurate, real-time, repeatable and realistic experiments with heterogeneous infrastructures. We show how EPIC can be applied to explore the impact of cyber-attacks and Information and Communications Technology (ICT) system disruptions on the power grid as well as their cascading effects to the railway system.JRC.E.2-Technology Innovation in Securit