Control Systems Security Subcommittee
Hi! My name is Dave Teumim, and I am
privileged to serve as chair for this
subcommittee.
With the events of September 11th, and the threat of terrorism on American and international soil, governments are looking at protecting critical infrastructures – from energy (refineries and pipelines) to electrical power (generating stations and transmission) to transportation (railways and ports). Also, industries that generate, store, or use large amounts of hazardous chemicals are being examined as a potential target of terrorism.
Refineries and chemical plants use process control systems for normal operations, and Safety Instrumented Systems to provide an additional ring of emergency protection. Energy transportation systems, like pipelines and powerlines, use SCADA systems for control and safety purposes. And all the while these control systems are becoming more automated and computerized, while moving toward open systems One may ask the following questions:
“How secure are the above control systems from a physical or cyber attack?”
“Can we evaluate security quantitatively and qualitatively like we do safety?”
“How can we educate ourselves in the relatively new and unfamiliar field of cybersecurity?”
In this subcommittee, I hope we can work on answering these questions together. We will focus on the following areas:
1) Control system security awareness, links, and liaisons.
(Awareness through linking to news accounts of physical or cyber attacks against control systems, Links to ISA and government sponsored standards and security activities, and Liaisons with chemical engineering organizations like the AICHE’s CCPS(Center for Chemical Process Safety), which is generating methodologies to evaluate security using techniques similar to hazards analysis techniques now used to evaluate process safety).
2) Security
education for the ISA community.
Help develop short courses, seminars, panel discussions on control systems
security.
Subcommittee Chair: David J Teumim is a consultant in the area of cybersecurity for the oil, gas, and chemical industries, and concentrates on security awareness and training. He recently retired from Agere Systems, a spinoff of Lucent Technologies, where he was a manager for global security, and worked on a variety of cybersecurity projects. Previously, he spent 15 years. working as a chemical engineer for Union Carbide Corp, BOC, and AT&T. He has a MS degree in Chemical Engineering from Manhattan College, and a BS degree in Industrial Engineering from SUNY at Buffalo.
Updated by Brian Smith on February 27, 2002.