Cloud-Assisted IoT-Based SCADA Systems Security: A Review of the State of the Art and Future Challenges

By Anam Sajid, Haider Abbas, Kashif Saleem. IEEE Access, 2016

370 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Industrial systems always prefer to reduce their operational expenses. To support such reductions, they need solutions that are capable of providing stability, fault tolerance, and flexibility. One such solution for industrial systems is cyber physical system (CPS) integration with the Internet of Things (IoT) utilizing cloud computing services. These CPSs can be considered as smart industrial systems, with their most prevalent applications in smart transportation, smart grids, smart medical and eHealthcare systems, and many more. These industrial CPSs mostly utilize supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems to control and monitor their critical infrastructure (CI). For example, WebSCADA is an application used for smart medical technologies, making improved patient monitoring and more timely decisions possible. The focus of the study presented in this paper is to highlight the security challenges that the industrial SCADA systems face in an IoT-cloud environment. Classical SCADA systems are already lacking in proper security measures; however, with the integration of complex new architectures for the future Internet based on the concepts of IoT, cloud computing, mobile wireless sensor networks, and so on, there are large issues at stakes in the security and deployment of these classical systems. Therefore, the integration of these future Internet concepts needs more research effort. This paper, along with highlighting the security challenges of these CI's, also provides the existing best practices and recommendations for improving and maintaining security. Finally, this paper briefly describes future research directions to secure these critical CPSs and help the research community in identifying the research gaps in this regard.

Subfields: Control and Systems Engineering, Hardware and Architecture, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/119f72ace01a714f2608638082f39c7df214670f

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Citations in the corpus

Industrial Cyberphysical Systems: A Backbone of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (2017, background): “In addition the security, safety, and trust aspects [18,21,74], not only at the ICPS level but also large-scale systems, are seen as challenging, especially due to the nature of interactions among ICPSs that are no longer a priori known and centrally managed.”
A Systematic Survey of Industrial Internet of Things Security: Requirements and Fog Computing Opportunities (2020, background): “Some older surveys dated back to 2015 and 2016 mention IIoT security requirements [17], [18], but they also refrain from an in-depth discussion.”
The Internet of Things, Fog and Cloud Continuum: Integration and Challenges (2018, background): “In relation to specific issues of increasing research interest one can highlight the body of work on security [160, 161], networking and communication 1035”
Cybersecurity for industrial control systems: A survey (2020, background): “[78] have provided a review focusing on the security challenges of cloudbased ICS systems.”
Advanced lightweight encryption algorithms for IoT devices: survey, challenges and solutions (2017, neutral): “In addition, IoT utilizes the cloud computing concept, which has many security issues and challenges (Sajid et al. 2016; Singh et al. 2016a, b, c; Kar and Mishra 2016; Zhou et al. 2017).”
A Survey on Industrial Internet of Things: A Cyber-Physical Systems Perspective (2018, methodology): “A typical SCADA system, as shown in Figure 6, consists of human machine interface (HMI), SCADA servers, remote terminal units (RTUs), sensors and actuators, and others [36].”
A Survey on Emerging SDN and NFV Security Mechanisms for IoT Systems (2019, background): “Other surveys deeply discuss security features for precise IoT application domains, such as smart grids [78], [79], vehicular networking [80], and Industrial Internet [81], [82].”
Internet of Things-Aided Smart Grid: Technologies, Architectures, Applications, Prototypes, and Future Research Directions (2017, background): “security concerns are discussed in detail in [64].”