Cybersecurity Vulnerability Scanner for Digital Nuclear Power Plant Instrumentation and Control Systems

Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) Instrumentation and Control (I&C) systems have been introduced for operational safety and accident prevention at nuclear facilities. Though the efficiency of these I&C systems has increased through digitalization, digitalization poses a threat owing to cybersecurity issues that might occur. In the event of a cybersecurity incident affecting the NPP I&C system, the stability of nuclear facilities can be threatened, and power supply could be interrupted. Therefore, various governments have established regulatory guidelines to improve the security of NPP I&C systems; these guidelines stipulate periodic checking of the I&C systems for cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Considering this, a vulnerability scanner for the nuclear environment is required. Therefore, in this study, we propose a cybersecurity vulnerability checking system to reduce the impact of such vulnerabilities as well as vulnerability checks on the NPP I&C system to ensure compliance with the automatic check regulatory guidelines. In summary, based on our experimental results, we observed that the network traffic generated by our proposed vulnerability scanner generated lesser network traffic than the existing active network scanning method as well as reduced the overhead on the object to be scanned. In addition, our proposed approach enabled compliance checks for certain automatically scanned elements of the NPP I&C systems during vulnerability scans; these automatically-scanned elements are defined in the regulatory guidelines.