Empirical Approach to Enhance the Security of DNP3 Protocol in SCADA System using Low-latency Block Cipher*

Critical infrastructures like Nuclear Power Plants (NPP), railroad networks, and water distribution / treatment systems are fundamentally important to human life. Failure of such structures endangers human lives, environment, and economy in world-wide scale. Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) system have been installed to operate those infrastructures efficiently and safely, but series of recent hacking incidents have stressed the importance to improve cyber-security of SCADA systems. This paper assesses basic differences between general IT systems and SCADA system, analyzes up-to-date technologies and approaches to secure the systems, and suggests cyber-security improvement of popular DNP3 protocol in SCADA system using authenticated encryption based on low-latency symmetric key cryptography and key management scheme.