Quantitative Evaluation of Virtual Private Networks and its Implications for Communication Security in Industrial Protocols

摘要

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are widely recommended to provide security for otherwise unsecured industrial and SCADA communication protocols. VPNs provide confidentiality, integrity, and availability and are often considered secure. However, implementation vulnerabilities and protocol flaws have exposed VPN weaknesses in many deployments. In this work, we use probabilistic modeling to evaluate and quantify the security of different VPN configurations. By simulating the VPN models in several experiments, we study the trade-offs and parameter dependence of each configuration. Using the evaluation results, we provide a few recommendations for secure VPN deployment in industrial systems.