Concept for Designing an ICS Testbed from a Penetration Testing Perspective

Industrial control systems are foundational to the operation of critical infrastructure and industrial processes. As such, they are prime targets for cyber attacks, necessitating a proper understanding of a system's attack surface. Cybersecurity testbeds provide a safe environment for exploring cyber attacks and their effects on systems and networks. However, devising a testbed can be a resourceintensive and time-consuming process. This is especially true from a penetration testing perspective, as most testbeds are not designed to support the exploration of chaining attacks against a wide variety of architectures, implementations, and software versions. This paper addresses this issue by proposing an iterative concept for creating flexible and scalable testbeds. It also presents lessons learned that influenced the concept and discusses and positions it in relation to current testbeds literature.