Importance of Authentication and Authorization in Critical Infrastructure Security

Running head: CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE SECURITY
Critical Infrastructure Security
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1CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE SECURITY
Importance of Authentication and Authorization
For the ICSs and SCADA systems, one of the main aspects is how a user is interacting with
the resources (such as remote server and local application) to ensure that the interaction
session has no problem and for this reason, proper authentication and authorization are
needed. When the system of ICSs and SCADA are having the mechanism of authentication
and authorization, it becomes difficult for the attackers to identify the system and to exploit
the system (Bartman & Carson, 2016). The hacker or the attacker faces difficulty to exploit
the system because integration of the authentication and the authorization in the ICSs and
SCADA systems lock down all of the services of the system to some specific individuals or
to some specific group of users so that the hackers are unable to access the resources of the
system. As the further access to the resources is restricted, performing an attack in the ICSs
and SCADA systems becomes very much difficult for the hackers (Hummen et al., 2014).
Also, there are various levels of authentication and authorization in the ICSs and SCADA
systems. A higher level of authentication and authorization means more security to the
system but also increases the complexity of the system.
Suggestion and Explanation for Securing field communication
For securing the field communication in the first section implementation of the IPsec can be
considered. The IPsec is suggested for securing field communication in the SCADA, and the
ICSs systems IPsec successfully builds a secure tunnel for the communication process among
two endpoints. Using the IPsec secret keys can be exchanged safely between the two
endpoints. When the communication channel is established using the IPsec protocol the
receiver, and the sender agrees on a particular type of encryption algorithm which will be
used for secure communication. For the secure field communication, IPsec uses the protocols
of confidentiality, message integrity and sender authentication. Wrapping the SCADA traffics