WonderICS: Hardware-in-the-loop platform for cybersecurity

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Plateforme Nanoelec/WonderICS (c) P.Jayet/CEA

The WonderICS platform – installed within Nanoelec at CEA at the end of 2020 – consists of a hardware-software co-simulation environment designed to alert the public and professionals to the cybersecurity threat to industrial control systems and experiment with innovative security solutions. The platform integrates simulators to emulate physical processes for different use cases such as hazardous gas management or hydroelectric power plants. “A set of tools can be used to attack industrial control systems in different ways (phishing mails, corrupted USB key, hardware Trojan, etc.). Fortunately, we also demonstrate organizational and technical solutions that would have prevented this type of attack”, comments Pierre-Henri Thevenon.

“In 2021, a new scenario around the Tennessee Eastman chemical process is under integration on the WonderICS platform and new attack scenarios are being carried out”, explains Pierre-Henri Thevenon, cybersecurity engineer at CEA who coordinated the design of WonderICS. The ‘Tennessee Eastman’ chemical process is a well-known physical process that simulates many typical characteristics of real-life complex industrial systems and processes.