Position Paper: Protecting Process Control Systems Against Lifecycle Attacks Using Trust Anchors

Critical infrastructure systems are vulnerable to physical and cyber attack. Securing these systems is a top priority for the U.S., but ongoing efforts ignore important aspects of the Information Technology (IT) lifecycle and focus primarily on securing the operational phase of these systems. Adversaries have ample opportunity to compromise the critical systems at every stage of those systems' lifecycles. The authors propose the use of trust anchors functional elements that can be developed through trustworthy processes and introduced into process control systems to provide critical security services that cannot be influenced by malicious content to address the lifecycle threats of the process control system.