Integrated simulation and emulation platform for cyber-physical system security experimentation

Abstract

There is a pressing need to evaluate both cyber- and physical systems together and holistically for a rapidly growing number of applications using simulation and emulation in a realistic environment, which brings realistic attacks against the defensive capabilities of CPS (Cyber-Physical System). Without the support from appropriate tools and run-time environments, this assessment process can be extremely time-consuming and error-prone, if possible at all. In this paper, we present iSEE - integrated Simulation and Emulation platform for security Experimentation, as a "software supporting research infrastructure used for cyber security research and development". iSEE allows for the concurrent modeling, experimentation and evaluation of CPS that range from a fully simulated to a fully implemented system. iSEE has two major components: 1) modeling environment for system specification and experiment configuration and 2) run-time environment that supports experiment execution. iSEE employs the Model-Integrated-Computing (MIC) approach, which explicitly uses models throughout the experiment environments and integrates them at the domain-specific model level. The run-time environment of iSEE integrates Matlab and the DETERlab testbed to support realistic assessment of CPS on real distributed networking environments in its early design phase, before a fully implemented system is available. At run time, iSEE provides time synchronization and data communication and coordinates the execution of the security experiment across simulation and emulation platforms.