Analysis of Cyber-Attacks for Modern Digital Railway System Using Cyber Range

Sharma, Gaurav; Sherif, Emad; He, Mary; Boiten, Eerke

Abstract

The simulation of a modern railway system on the cyber range will investigate the supple behavior of cyber-attacks in a modern digital railway system. The contemporary digital railway simulation architecture will focus on the railway's signaling system and the control command system, which is a classic SCADA system. With the introduction of IoT technology to railway systems, they have become vulnerable to cyber-attacks. The simulation is conducted on the cyber range server by simulating STCS. The cyber threats will be analyzed through penetration testing using Kali Linux on the simulated STCS on the cyber range. We analyze the impact of the threat agent groups, especially denial of service (DoS) and quay chain attacks that mainly target the STCS. The DoS attack generates the congestion of packets in the railway system network and will compromise the SCADA components in the STCS. The quay chain attack compromises the SCADA component, resulting in a delay in the signal system of STCS. The attack tree analysis helps us to understand the behavior of threat agents on STCS. Based on the research, we identified some mitigation techniques to reduce the cyber-attacks impact on the modern digital railway system.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: 2022 IEEE Conference on Interdisciplinary Approaches in Technology and Management for Social Innovation (IATMSI)
• Start Date: Dec 21, 2022
• End Date: Dec 23, 2022
• Acceptance Date: May 15, 2023
• Online Publication Date: May 15, 2023
• Publication Date: May 15, 2023
• Deposit Date: Jun 10, 2025
• Journal: IEEE International Conference on Interdisciplinary Approaches in Technology and Management for Social Innovation (IATMSI-2022)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Book Title: 2022 IEEE Conference on Interdisciplinary Approaches in Technology and Management for Social Innovation (IATMSI)
• ISBN: 978-1-6654-7720-8
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/IATMSI56455.2022.10119321