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The project aims to help setup a minimal, low-cost Industrial Control System (ICS) testbest for students, researchers, or anyone with an interest in industrial security. The project contains a list of affordable hardware to build the minimalistic ICS with, instructions, configurations and installation scripts to instantiate the system as well as various attacker scenarios and their implications.

Our goal is to ease the entry into the industrial security sector. Industrial hardware is usually quite expensive as well as mostly proprietary, both of which do not encourage easy learning. With the upcoming of Industry 4.0, however, it has become imperative that the security of industrial networks and components is up to par with the modern cyber risks of the connected world. Practice and knowledge has to be accessible and affordable to empower engineers and developers to master the challenges of the fourth industrial revolution.

Although the testbed only comprises of the bare minimum components necessary for an ICS, the concepts and more importantly, the attack scenarios are mostly the same.

The picture shows the setup of the testbed with the HMI and the physical process.

This project was set up with the following requirements in mind:

• Testbed components for about 500 Euro, which is affordable by most researchers and students.
• A real-world physical process controlled by an ICS, which enables to demonstrate and analyze the impacts of cyber attacks in the real-world.
• The components are open-source and open-hardware, as far as possible. This allows a wide range of further research.
• We provide attacker models and attacks to understand threat scenarios in industrial environments.
• The feasibility of the testbed is shown and ideas for further research and teaching is discussed.

• Devices
• Attacks
• Images
• Tools
• Network captures

• HMI
• PLC
• scada
• Remote IO
• 3d-printed Case.

We try to keep the prerequisites as little as possible to reduce the hurdle for beginners.

• OpenPLC is licensed under GPL-3.0
• CubeMX generated code for STM32 is copyrighted by STMicroelectronics
• ScadaLTS is licensed under MIT License

At the beginning you may be a bit confused by the many different components. However, the assembly is not as difficult as expected.

1. Ordering the necessary components (click)
2. Assembly and wiring (to-do)
3. Programming the devices (stm32/RPI)
4. Testing LICSTER
5. Have fun and make the world more secure

You find the research paper here. To cite the work you can use the official bibtex entry:

@article{ScienceOpenVid:4fa78131-80f5-4fca-b45a-bfd6a04ae2cc,\
    author = {Sauer, Felix and Niedermaier, Matthias and Kießling, Susanne and Merli, Dominik},\
    title = {LICSTER – A Low-cost ICS Security Testbed for Education and Research},\
    journal = {},\
    year = 2019,\
    volume = {},\
    number = {},\
    pages = {1-10},\
    doi = {10.14236/ewic/icscsr19.1}\
}