August 24th, 2021, I will be on an Engineering Infrastructure Resilience Panel discussing Cyber-Physical Security of Critical Infrastructures – Catastrophic Risks and Mitigation Strategies. Panelists will include Walter Grayman, Ali Mosleh from UCLA, Shaikha Al-Sanad from the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research, Andrew Ohrt from West Yost, John Organek from the EIS Council, and myself. My presentation will address the lack of cyber security, authentication, and cyber logging of Level 0,1 control system devices. Specifically, I will address how monitoring of the electronic characteristics of the process instrumentation can provide ground truth process anomaly detection regardless of the state of the IT or OT networks. With the plethora of control systems and critical infrastructure equipment coming from China with untrusted pedigrees, the process anomaly detection approach may be one of the few ways of addressing this existential problem such as the equipment identified in Presidential Executive Order 13920.
