With the ongoing adoption of remotely communicating and interacting control systems harbored by critical infrastructures, the potential attack surface of such systems also increases drastically. Therefore, not only the need for standardized and manufacturer-agnostic control system communication protocols has grown, but also the requirement to protect those control systems’ communication. There have already been numerous security analyses of different control system communication protocols; yet, these have not been combined with each other sufficiently, mainly due to three reasons: First, the life cycles of such protocols are usually much longer than those of other Internet and communication technologies, therefore legacy protocols are often not considered in current security analyses. Second, the usage of certain control system communication protocols is usually restricted to a particular infrastructure domain, which leads to an isolated view on them. Third, with the accelerating pace at which both control system communication protocols and threats against them develop, existing surveys are aging at an increased rate, making their re-investigation a necessity. In this paper, a comprehensive survey on the security of the most important control system communication protocols, namely Modbus, OPC UA, TASE.2, DNP3, IEC 60870-5-101, IEC 60870-5-104, and IEC 61850 is performed. To achieve comparability, a common test methodology based on attacks exploiting well-known control system protocol vulnerabilities is created for all protocols. In addition, the effectiveness of the related security standard IEC 62351 is analyzed by a pre-and post-IEC 62351 comparison.

In this work, a secure wireless sensor network (WSN) for the surveillance, monitoring and protection of critical infrastructures was developed. To guarantee the security of the system, the main focus was the implementation of a unique security concept, which includes both security on the communication level, as well as mechanisms that ensure the functional safety during its operation. While there are many theoretical approaches in various subdomains of WSNs—like network structures, communication protocols and security concepts—the construction, implementation and real-life application of these devices is still rare. This work deals with these aforementioned aspects, including all phases from concept-generation to operation of a secure wireless sensor network. While the key focus of this paper lies on the security and safety features of the WSN, the detection, localization and classification capabilities resulting from the interaction of the nodes’ different sensor types are also described.