Design and Implementation of a Secure Modbus Protocol

The security of the ICT components of industrial systems is gaining great importance in the context of their criticality for society at large. There is an urgent need for the consideration of security in their design, and for the analysis of the related vulnerabilities and potential threats. The high exposure of critical infrastructure to such threats is mainly due to the intrinsic weakness of the communication protocols used to control the process network. In this paper, after analyzing the shortcomings of the ModBUS protocol, we present a Secure-ModBUS protocol implementation aiming at hardening its confidentiality, integrity, authentication and non-repudiation properties with regard to the communication between the Master and Slaves of a SCADA architecture.JRC.G.6-Security technology assessmen