Simulating Industrial Control Systems using mininet

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are responsible for controlling, monitoring and managing industrial productions. The critical nature of ICS makes it the target of numerous attacks, thus its security must be well established but this is not always the case. The research on this field are difficult to perform because the devices are expensive and the results are not shareable as they could reveal sensible information about the system used. In this Master Thesis we created an ICS simulator that can support open research with fully virtualized testbeds. The solution uses Mininet to emulate SDN networks with POX as the SDN controller. We modified and used OpenPLC to play the role of PLC and MTU both communicating together using the Modbus/TCP protocol. Furthermore, we used PyScada as a SCADA system and CloudFirewall to act as firewall. In addition we modified the Mininet animator called MiniNAM to support the visualization of our ICS components. Two different ways are proposed to generate ICS examples, one visual by using MiniEdit that we adapted and the other automated by giving parameters to a Python script. Finally we tested attacks that can be encountered in real systems against a running ICS simulation and explained the possible countermeasures.