Welcome back to salted hash. I'm your host Steve Reagan. I'm here with Bryson. We're going to talk about the ICS village
We'll be right back
All right, so welcome back as I said, I'm Steve Reagan the host of salted hash senior staff writer at CSO online
I'm with Bryson and we're at the ICS village at the RSA Conference. I've been out here all week filming so
It's it's been a long week. How's the village going for you? Doing good? Oh, it's going great
I really believe that the villages are the biggest value in the future of conferences
It's not just about coming and listen to someone talk and even if it's a really really cool talk
Here's your chance to come and get hands-on with something and not just hands-on and sort of this awkward kind of well
What is that way but we've got not just our village but all of the villages have these
passionates experts that are there to help walk you through and orient you and get it to a chance to kind of like ah,
I see I get it and to you know
continue and to learn so critical infrastructure and control systems are a bit of a pain point for a lot of
Companies and even politicians. So where did the ICS village start? What was the nexus for that?
And how has it evolved over the last couple of years?
So I want to give a shout out to one of our co-founders tom Van Norman
He's really like we kind of joke. He's the brains
I don't know what I'm good at and then our other two founders beau woods and Larry insert very long
Dutch name that starts with the beat
All have just fantastic technical and policy
credibility in the community both from helping to do exhibits doing this for full-time jobs and helping to advise those policy people and
how it all came together was we are at DEFCON at the ICS village last year and
We looked around and the challenge that we have with the ICS village is most people don't know
What an ICS is right you go to the car hacking village
People know what cars are right you go to the IOT village and people are like I have a phone
I know what that is. So there it's a lot more accessible to people
ICS, it's not accessible and we really need the actual equipment
You need to see hm eyes PLC's micro controllers and get to touch in place
So you can ah, I see that but the problem is the stuffs proprietary
It's really expensive and it's so heavy
So it costs a lot of money to build this to maintain it to ship it around
So we're looking at we have all these passionate volunteers and folks that are doing this in their free time
They're taking over their garages
Marriages are being ruined
and
At the same time. How do we how do we make this easier?
So that was where the idea that we all got together and like why don't we?
Formally organize a 501c3
With our goal being let's provide education awareness on these systems
And so that's that's the mission and that's where it all came from
so what kind of demos or
Gear do you keep out here in the sandbox for people to see and interact with so the village is constantly changing
I'll give a shout out to our newest exhibit that's here and Airbus and clarity work together to create the
first ICS village capture the flag competition and what they have is
combined with the website with challenges and the traditional scoreboard format they have
Actual hardware so you can work with physical pieces at the same time as you're working the challenge coming back in with you know
The different pieces of protocols the other thing. I think it's really neat about that exhibit is
There's a PLC on there. That's quite famous in history. It's a Siemens PLC and it was the same one
That was a part of the Stuxnet attacks. So a little bit of history there. The mainstay of the ICS village is the wall
very large exhibit where we have the human management interface the HMI where you can come and see and see the results of like a
water filtration
system one of the challenges with that is we want folks to be able to try to trick the system into being able to
Release more quantities of chemicals into the water supply and there's a water pump there and there's a heat transfer
So you get to physically see those pieces
future vision for where we want to go with that is
turning that into
An entire slice of modern society where you have all the way from power generation to transmission to the pieces that consume
That energy and the water and all those elements
Which brings us to the final exhibit which is the howdy neighbor exhibit
So we have a whole model house there with about 20 to 25 different appliances
That is also a capsule flag challenge. Although it's not enabled. So we're just able to do different demonstrations of
Kinds of challenges in the connectivity of Internet of Things which coincidentally also tied to the talk I gave earlier today
So to kind of sum this up, obviously the the main goal of the village is awareness
So for those who don't really understand the impact ICS has on their daily lives
Give them a quick head of awareness and let's go check out some of the toys
Okay
modern civilization completely rests on this concept of critical infrastructure if you like water and you like electricity
That's industrial control systems
So this is where it's talking about where you have the
Website that you go to and so the scoreboard do we have the scoreboard cycling up?
Oh, yeah
So you can see
You can see the scoreboard of the teams that are currently competing and working and doing this and that's actually really impressive for RSA
Like that's excited. There's teams playing
and then that ties into the the physical challenges themselves of the different pieces that you can do and then this was the
PLC that if it's talking about that's famous
So what's the house?
So this is howdy neighbor this is an entire capture-the-flag competition as well it has its own scoreboarding challenges
so
Everything in the village has to pass what we call the spouse testing
If you've never touched the computer before you have no idea what this is
you can follow the instructions which are simple enough for any spouse to be able to pick up and do it and
This gives you a basic orientation to not only the exhibit but the concepts and how these things work
So it kind of helps to turn the lights on to get you started
for the more advanced folks
then it starts to work them into understanding the challenges because now you're
Attacking the right space because we make sure you're oriented attack in the house not just things around
because this actually presents in the competition like a house with all of these different IOT devices and it would
and then you score points based on the level of access that you get to those devices and the different kinds of pieces that you
Do that's the representation of the Drago's so you can see their asset management and overall dashboard
So that ties in to the range and then we have it. That's the ICS village from the RSA Conference
I'm your host Steve Reagan, and this has been salted hash. We'll see you next time. Thanks for coming