DEF CON 29 ICS Village - Stefan Stephenson-Moe -  Detecting Attackers  with State Estimation
Channel: DEFCONConference
Date: 2021-09-20

As OT technologies like PLCs and RTU become smarter and more capable of running standard operating systems, the concern of malware infecting OT technologies has become more of a realistic threat. In cases like Stuxnet where the attacker wishes to cause damage to a system while keeping the user unaware it must do so by modifying sensor data that would alert the user to a change in the system. State estimation is a technique used in the Power Industry to detect when sensors are providing garbage data. In this talk I plan to explain how state estimation works and how it can be applied as a technique for detecting an attacker attempting to manipulate sensor data for nefarious purposes.