Industrial Control System (ICS) Network Asset Identification and Risk Management

Abstract: Setting against the significant background of Industrial 4.0, the Industrial Control System (ICS) accelerates and enriches the upgrade the existing production infrastructure. To make the infrastructures “smart”, huge parts of manual operations have been automated in this upgrade and more importantly, the isolated controlled processes have been connected through ICS. This has also raised the issues in asset management and security concerns. Being the starting point of securing the ICS, the asset identification is, nevertheless, first dealt by exploring the definition of assets in the ICS domain due to insufficient documentation and followed by the introduction of ICS constituents and their statuses in the whole network. When the definition is clear, a well-received categorization of assets in the ICS domain is introduced, while mapping out their important attributes and their significance relating the core of service they perform. To effectively tackle the ever-increasing amount of assets, identification approaches are compared and a case study was performed to test the effectiveness of two open source software. Apart from the identification part, this thesis describes a framework for efficient asset management from CRR. The four cyclic modules proposed give an overview on how the asset management should be managed according the dynamics of the assets in the production environment.