trast, by definition, an eavesdropping attack does not
change the way the system works. Therefore, the
control-flow is unchanged and other perspectives are
necessary for the detection of eavesdropping attacks.
4.4 Prohibition of the Shutdown
In order to prevent the shutdown, conformance check-
ing would have to be done before the breaker in-
terrupts. This requirement would also result in the
need to analyze incomplete traces. In order to pro-
hibit a large-scale turnoff due to an intrusion, con-
formance checking should be applied early enough,
i.e., before the shutdown is performed, asking for a
check by the intrusion detection system. Performing
all these checks in time is suspected to require big ef-
forts. However, even in this case the intrusion into the
smart meter and its exploitation can not be detected
before the shutdown by the consideration of the con-
trol flow.
4.5 Strongly Controlled Processes
The detection methods above either look at the pro-
cess ID, the smart meter ID or perform conformance
checking. While the check of the smart meter ID is
clearly beneficial, the check of the process ID has a
significant drawback: (shutdown) messages without
a valid process-ID automatically need to be consid-
ered as dangerous. Therefore, the process must be
strongly modeled, controlled and monitored not al-
lowing unattributed messaged, i.e., messages that are
not assigned to a certain process. Otherwise a lot
of false positive alarms would occur. This property
certainly limits the practical application. In order to
work in practice, a way to distinguish messages that
are not assigned to a process due to intrusions from
unassigned messages due to loose process control will
need to be found.
4.6 Limitation of the Analysis
The analysis above focuses on exploitations of intru-
sions that lead to a shutdown. Other attacks are also
possible. As an example, an attack could try to con-
fuse the system by inhibiting the smart meter from
sending the confirmation of the status, send wrong
status or consumption messages. While these attacks
do not lead to a turnoff it could still result in consider-
able damage. For example wrong consumption values
sent in another use case could result to a wrong sys-
tem status which in turn could trigger wrong activities
by the network operator.
5 CONCLUSION AND OUTLOOK
In this paper the potential of process mining for the
detection of attacks on the smart metering shutdown
use case is explored. This is done by systematically
deriving attacks on the modeled shutdown process.
For each attack, its detection using process mining
is analytically explored and modeled by an attack-
defense tree. It could be shown that process mining
has the potential to detect exploitations of intrusions
aiming at an illegitimate shutdown of smart meters.
Based on this analysis several benefits and limitations
of the method are discussed: from the methodical
view, the control-flow oriented analysis should be ac-
companied by considering other views of the process.
From a practical view, the fact that attacks can lead to
unattributed messages is supposed to be problematic
for loosely controlled processes.
Subsequent work will explore ways to combine
the control flow analysis with other views. In addi-
tion to this analytic study, a comparative validation
study with real data will be performed. Besides find-
ing solutions for dealing with unattributed messages,
the method will be compared with other approaches in
terms of detection and false positive rates. This will
be achieved by using an envisaged toolchain which is
suited for an automated large-scale evaluation of the
approaches.
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