The design and implementation of a PLC honeypot for detecting cyber attacks against industrial control systems

Programmable logic controllers (PLCs) are used widely to control industrial processes and communicate with the supervisory system. Until recently, industrial operators relied on the assumption that these PLCs are isolated from the online world and hence cannot be the target of attacks. Recent events, such as the infamous Stuxnet attack directed the attention of the security and control system community to the vulnerabilities of control system elements, such as PLCs. In this paper, we design and implement a PLC honeypot system to detect targeted attacks against industrial control systems. Our honeypot implementation improves upon existing solutions in several aspects: most importantly it is a high interaction easy to configure solution. The usability of this approach is showed in preliminary real life deployments.