Work

Safety-security convergence: Automation of IEC 62443-3-2

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are designed to provide a service, such as power generation or water treatment, while protecting people, assets, and the environment against hazard. However, ICS now integrate Information Technology (IT) and are interconnected with the outside world such as the Internet, thereby exposing their infrastructures to cyberattacks. Cyberattacks have thus become new threats for industrial system operations and, more specifically, for their safety. To address the issue, this paper presents a comprehensive cybersecurity risk assessment for the safety of ICS. We apply our method to automate industrial cybersecurity risk assessment as specified in the recent (2020) IEC 62443-3-2 standard, which is widely used in the industrial cybersecurity domain. By automating parts of these risk assessment processes, we can reduce the error-prone manual efforts and increase the consistency of risk assessment. More specifically, the proposed risk assessment comprises three parts which, respectively: (1) identify the specific vulnerabilities of industrial control systems, (2) determine the attack scenarios that compromise the safety of the system and (3) assess whether the attack scenarios are tolerable by the organization’s policy. In the first part, we automated the entire threat modeling process of Microsoft Threat Modeling Tool by developing an automatable method for building the system model, in the form of a data flow diagram, from a standard XML file called PLCOpen. This automation of the Microsoft Threat Modeling Tool process enables us to automate vulnerability identification for industrial control systems. In the second part, we enhance a previous work that generates theoretical safety-compromising attack scenarios by building a complete attack scenario from system vulnerabilities to safety compromise. Finally, in the third part, we rank the attack scenarios using a specific risk matrix in order to determine which scenarios exceed the risk tolerable by the organization and therefore require additional controls.

Source: Computers & Security

DOI: 10.1016/j.cose.2025.104477

Authors: Mike Da Silva, Stéphane Mocanu, Maxime Puys, Pierre-Henri Thevenon