Honeypot Inside an OPC UA Wrapper for Water Pumping Stations

Abstract

The honeypot technologies provided several research themes in the past years, primarily for detection and information gathering against external threats. The water infrastructure and generally automation/SCADA systems may be vulnerable to attacks. In case of critical infrastructures, the protection is necessary because an eventual successful attack can cause major damages. The paper presents a solution for protecting water pumping stations from threats using a honeypot inside an OPC UA wrapping structure. As known, Industry 4.0 and Industrial Internet of Things concepts are moving the industry towards interoperability and interoperation. OPC UA is the defined and widely accepted interfacing solution. The transition to OPC UA for both new and legacy systems can be realized through wrappers, such middleware protocol conversion and data wrapping structures are studied and developed. The proposed honeypot is conceived for Node-RED based applications being able to access Modbus, S7, OPC UA local structures and exposing tags in OPC UA server. The implemented structure was tested proving satisfactory results.