Ultra-Low Latency Security Hardening of Modbus/TCP Protocol Based on ZUC Cryptographic Algorithm

Dinghua Zhang, Yuan Gao, Quan Pan, Chen Yang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Modbus/TCP is a common industrial control protocol, but security was not considered at the beginning of the design. Many researchers have proposed cryptography-based Modbus/TCP security hardening schemes. However, most of the existing solutions rely on public key algorithm and certificate mechanism, which enforce a large performance loss on resource-constrained industrial control equipment. It results in a great impact on the industrial control environments which usually have strict communication delay jitter requirements. This paper proposes a Modbus/TCP security reinforcement mechanism based on cryptographic algorithms including SM3 and ZUC etc., which can provide ultra-low-latency security protection on the resource-constrained industrial control devices, including the device identity authentication, communication data confidentiality and integrity protection, and anti-replay attack, etc. Taking advantage of the features that the devices deployed in the industrial control environment are relatively fixed and the Modbus/TCP protocol is usually used in the scenarios with low-to-medium-throughput data rate, a protection mechanism based on pre-shared keys and key pre-computation is designed, with which the real-time communication could be protected through a small amount of lightweight XOR operations. The prototype system is implemented on the Cortex-M7 industrial control microcontroller. The performance evaluation results show that for a Modbus/TCP communication, the average communication delay introduced by the real-time protection is 31.2.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2024 IEEE 12th International Conference on Information and Communication Networks, ICICN 2024
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages25-30
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9798350355802
DOIs
StatePublished - 2024
Event12th IEEE International Conference on Information and Communication Networks, ICICN 2024 - Guilin, China
Duration: 21 Aug 202424 Aug 2024

Publication series

Name2024 IEEE 12th International Conference on Information and Communication Networks, ICICN 2024

Conference

Conference12th IEEE International Conference on Information and Communication Networks, ICICN 2024
Country/TerritoryChina
CityGuilin
Period21/08/2424/08/24

Keywords

  • industrial control protocol
  • low latency
  • Modbus/TCP
  • resource-constrained
  • ZUC cryptographic algorithm

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