Assessment of the ICT security of a railway infrastructure
An operator of a medium-sized railway infrastructure was required to provide real-time information on the traffic situation to a national system. This required the introduction of new IT systems and a connection from the operational systems (OT) to an Internet interface.
Emch+Berger AG Bern was contracted to prepare a risk analysis for this project.
The risk analysis of the operational systems (OT) was based on a thorough assessment of the asset inventory including the configuration of firewalls, the identification of existing zones and their isolation as well as the type of data traffic between the zones. The probability and impact of various threats were derived for each zone.
During the analysis, undocumented direct connections to critical systems were discovered in the existing system, which would have allowed access from outside.
The analysis revealed further problems such as knowledge drain or weak protection of installations using virtual machines.
Emch+Berger AG Bern suggested using a dedicated gateway to achieve better isolation of the OT systems not only from the Internet, but also from exposed field elements.
The proposed solution achieved a significant improvement in system security at low cost.
