CoFacS – Simulating a Complete Factory to Study the Security of Interconnected Production

While the digitization of industrial factories provides tremendous improvements for the production of goods, it also renders such systems vulnerable to serious cyber-attacks. To research, test, and validate security measures protecting industrial networks against such cyber-attacks, the security community relies on testbeds to simulate industrial systems, as utilizing live systems endangers costly components or even human life. However, existing testbeds focus on individual parts of typically complex production lines in industrial factories. Consequently, the impact of cyber-attacks on industrial networks as well as the effectiveness of countermeasures cannot be evaluated in an end-to-end manner. To address this issue and facilitate research on novel security mechanisms, we present CoFacS, the first COmplete FACtory Simulation that replicates an entire production line and affords the integration of real-life industrial applications. To showcase that CoFacS accurately captures real-world behavior, we validate it against a physical model factory widely used in security research. We show that CoFacS has a maximum deviation of 0.11% to the physical reference, which enables us to study the impact of physical attacks or network-based cyber-attacks. Moreover, we highlight how CoFacS enables security research through two cases studies surrounding attack detection and the resilience of 5G-based industrial communication against jamming.