A security assessment methodology for critical infrastructures

Interest in security assessment and penetration testing techniques has steadily increased. Likewise, security of industrial control systems (ICS) has become more and more important. Very few methodologies directly target ICS and none of them generalizes the concept of "critical infrastructures pentesting". Existing methodologies and tools cannot be applied directly to critical infrastructures (CIs) due to safety and availability requirements. Moreover, there is no clear understanding on the specific output that CI operators need from such an assessment. We propose a new methodology tailored to support security testing in ICS/CI environments. By analyzing security assessments and penetration testing methodologies proposed for other domains and interviewing stakeholders to identify existing best practices adopted in industry, deriving related issues and collecting proposals for possible solutions we propose a new security assessment and penetration testing methodology for critical infrastructure