Study on Modbus/DNP3 Protocol

Topics Covered:
 How does Modbus/DNP3 protocol work?
 What are the possible attacks to Modbus/DNP3 protocol?
 What are the possible security solutions (prevent/detect/mitigate) against those attacks in the literature?
 What are the challenges to address those security issues in legacy CPS?
 What are the relevant commercial products that can be deployed to defend against those attacks?
 What have you learnt from this study (a summary)?
1 How Modbus/DNP3 works?

2 Vulnerabilities & Possible Attacks on Modbus/DNP3

3 Prevention/Detection/Mitigation

4 Legacy CPS Security Issues & Challenges

5 Products that help defending

6 Learnings from this exercise

 Distributed Network (DNP3) Protocol
 An pen-source serial communication protocol, widely used in implementing SCADA networks.
 Contains Application and Data Link Layers, with a pseudo-transport layer.
 Widely used by major utilities in water and electric companies.

DNP3 Basic Design Objectives

DNP3 is designed to optimize the transmission of data and control commands from a master to one or more remote devices
or outstations with below objectives:
 Remote communications
 Limited bandwidth
 Possible use with Modems: more time for handshaking
 Interrupted communications
 Radio interference; Terrain, Trees, Buildings
 Outstation stores event data until retrieved / acknowledged by Master
 Event Time-stamping
 Outstation time-stamps, not the Master
 Permits coherent sequencing of events at the Master
 MODBUS Protocol
 An pen-source serial communication protocol, industry standard for connecting various industrial devices.
 Contains Application Layer Protocol
 Widely used in industrial plants for integrating and using it with PLCs (Programmable Logic Controller)

MODBUS Basic Design Objectives

Modbus is a master-slave communication protocol which is capable of supporting up to 247 slaves for
communications with supervisory computers in SCADA systems, designed with below design objectives:
 Dedicated Wire or Fibre connection between stations
 Short distances
 Controlled environment and communication dynamics
 Robust, dedicated physical connection expected
 Tolerable Sequence of Events timing incoherency as acquired by Master.
 Known Security Vulnerabilities and Possible Attacks – NDP3
NDP3 Security Issues
Major security flaws in DNP3 are:
 Lack of Confidentiality: As the messages are transmitted in clear text across the transmission media due to lack of
message confidentiality due to unavailability of any encryption
 Lack of Integrity: No protocol intrinsic robust integrity checks like message checksum for checking errors and garbled
messages on communications at higher layers
 Lack of Authentication: All the messages get communicated without standardized authentication
 NDP3 messages are prone to Man-in-the-middle attack
 Known Security Vulnerabilities and Possible Attacks - Modbus

Modbus Security Issues

MODBUS being an old protocol, developed way back in 197Since Modbus was developed in 1979, not much attention was
paid to security concerns. The major security loopholes are:
 Lack of Confidentiality: As the messages are transmitted in clear text across the transmission media due to lack of
message confidentiality due to unavailability of any encryption
 Lack of Integrity: No protocol intrinsic robust integrity checks like message checksum for checking errors and garbled
messages on communications at higher layers
 Lack of Authentication: All the messages get communicated without standardized authentication
 Simplistic Framing: MODBUS frames are sent over established TCP connections. While such connections are usually
reliable, they have a significant drawback.
 Lack of Session Structure: Being a request/response protocol, Modbus consists of short-lived transactions where the
master initiates a request to the slave that results in a single action. This combined with the lack of authentication and
poor TCP initial sequence number (ISN) generation, it becomes possible for attackers to inject commands with no
knowledge of the existing session.
 Lack of broadcast suppression and potential reliability issues of network communications
 Security Solution – Modbus TCP
Modbus Security Solutions: Modbus TCP
 Extension to long-standing Modbus/TCP protocol was carried out and new improved Modbus/TCP
security protocol is an extension.
 This utilizes ‘Transport Layer Security’ (TLS) to provide a security level applicable to industrial
control systems.
 TLS encapsulates the legacy headers of MBTCP for backward compatibility while adding vendor-
specific rules-based authorization and certificate-based authentication.
 Modbus security encapsulates packets inside a well-established, standardized protocol, this is an
excellent system for securing industrial control systems. This encapsulation helps maintaining
privacy, incorporating cryptography with digital certificate secure key management and
ensuring the reliability of communications link through high-level message integrity checking.
 This solution seems to offer everything required for a secure network, along with near-
ubiquitous support from web-browsers. However, security attacks are commonplace and on-
going.
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