SBIR-STTR Award

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are critical elements in electrical, water, oil/gas, and manufacturing services involving supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), distributed control systems (DCS), and programmable logic controllers (PLCs). These systems allow operators to monitor sensor data and remotely control field devices. Initially, these devices were designed for closed-network or non-networked environments inside of physically secure facilities. These early systems did not take into account cyber threats such as viruses, worms, Trojans, and system exploitations from buffer overflows, logic errors, network protocols, and denial of service (DOS) attacks. However, ICS have evolved into highly technical distributed systems directly and indirectly connected to the Internet where they are exposed to cyber attacks. Pikewerks proposes to research and develop a system for protecting the software executing on these systems without requiring any changes to the source code.

Keywords:
Industrial Control Systems, Scada, Distributed Control Systems, Software Protection, Reverse Engineering, Anti-Tamper

Pikewerks' Protection for Industrial and Environmental Controls from Exploitation, or PIECE, will be a cross-platform suite of capabilities providing anti-exploitation and anti-reconnaissance for Industrial Control Systems. PIECE will provide a suite of capabilities for Windows, Linux, VxWorks, and legacy devices that ensure survivability of critical infrastructure equipment. Anti-exploitation will be provided through the prevention of a variety of techniques commonly used by malware and rootkits. Further, PIECE will provide kernel and network protections to ensure secure communications across distributed heterogeneous networks.

Keywords:
High-Availability, Network Resilience, Network Survivability, Anti-Exploitation, Scada, Ics, Legacy