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A Software-Based Error Detection Technique for Monitoring the Program Execution of RTUs in SCADA

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Abstract

A Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system is an Industrial Control System (ICS) which controls large scale industrial processes including several sites over long distances and consists of some Remote Terminal Units (RTUs) and a Master Terminal Unit (MTU). RTUs collect data from sensors and control actuators situated at remote sites and send data to the MTU through a network. Since RTUs operate in a harsh industrial environment, fault tolerance is a key requirement particularly for safety-critical industrial processes. Studies show that a significant number of transient faults due to a harsh environment result in control flow errors in the RTU’s processors. A software error detection technique has been proposed to detect control flow errors in several RTUs. For experimental evaluation 30,000 faults injected on network; the average performance and memory overheads are about 33.20 % and 36.79 %, respectively and this technique detected more than 96.32 % of injected faults.

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Acknowledgement

The authors would like to appreciate Parin Beton Amood Company for providing the opportunity of field work and evaluation of the ICS-CFC technique in a real Industrial Control System.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dependable Distributed Embedded Systems (DDEmS) Laboratory, Computer Engineering Department, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran

    Navid Rajabpour & Yasser Sedaghat

Authors
  1. Navid Rajabpour
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  2. Yasser Sedaghat
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yasser Sedaghat .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Floor Koornneef

  2. University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, United Kingdom

    Coen van Gulijk

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Rajabpour, N., Sedaghat, Y. (2015). A Software-Based Error Detection Technique for Monitoring the Program Execution of RTUs in SCADA. In: Koornneef, F., van Gulijk, C. (eds) Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security. SAFECOMP 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9337. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24255-2_33

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24255-2_33

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-24254-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-24255-2

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