(166c) Plantxr: Supporting Plant Operators with Virtual and Augmentedreality

Critical Infrastructures (CIs), such as chemical plants and water treatment plants are increasingly prone to cyber-physical attacks since they are increasingly adopting networked solutions such as embedded systems and Internet of Things. These CIs have multi-faceted and large-scale impact on the serviced geographical regions. CI plants such as water treatment plants often pose chemical hazard risk if compromised. For example, water treatment plants process water using among other things controlled hazardous substances such as sulphuric acid and chlorine. A compromise can easily contaminate a city's supply of potable water with unhealthy levels of the above substances, or contaminate the area surrounding the plant. The Stuxnet incident and the Florida water plant's poisoning attack of 2021 among many others reminds us of how vulnerable CIs are to cyber-physical attacks.

Despite cyber-physical attacks posing an increasing threat, plant operators are often not trained with a combined cyber-physical awareness of the plant and its interactions, overlooking either the physical dimension or interaction between digital and physical dimension. For example, without a combined cyber-physical training it is difficult for operators to visualize potential damage done to components physically adjacent to one another but which normally would be isolated or far from each other in the system representation, such as pipes from different stages of a plant close to each other. During floods caused by leakage or explosions due to mechanical or chemical damage, several unconnected components may be damaged by another due to physical proximity not reflected on a 2D monitoring system such as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems which rely on an abstracted model of the plant.

Solution: more visibility into plant status, security, service

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, their combination termed as Mixed/eXtended Reality (MR/XR), are spatial computing technologies deployable in large scale National CIs such as Chemical plants and Water Treatment plants. These technologies can help address the issues of cyber-physical integration as outlined above.

PlantXR, our project, is a virtual 3-dimensional world for visualizing Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) such as CIs, for example a Water Treatment and Distribution plant. It is aimed at improving the cyber-physical security of such CIs, and it can be used in plant design, simulation, training, monitoring and forensic investigation. It addresses the lack of integration between spatial, 3-dimensional information and numerical or model-based information such as pure text, numbers, tables or system models such as one used on SCADA systems. In PlantXR, spatial and non-spatial information is displayed in a seamlessly integrated manner, in various ways to give the user a more holistic grasp of the plant.

These emerging technologies are increasingly important in the post-COVID19 world where the physical proximity of workforce to plant operations cannot be assumed. These technologies completely change and improve the way the modern-day workforce engages with their assigned roles, equipment, and with each other.

Training and Learning modules can be delivered via Mixed Reality technology (such as the Microsoft HoloLens) which directly leads to the development of skills among the workforce for better grasp and minimized human errors. This provides distraction-free and focused active learning which ensures the continuing education and training of operators and maintenance workers. This impactful approach in learning through Mixed Reality technology is in line with with a ‘security by design’ approach to Critical Infrastructures. This helps stakeholders at all levels of the organization.

PlantXR can also visualize the possible attacks and defence measures in CIs. At iTrust, we have developed a Virtual Reality application for our Secure Water Treatment (SWaT) testbed facility. It is accessed by wearing an Oculus Rift headset, a handheld device, or a desktop computer, where the user/teleoperator can move about and interact with the plant in the virtual space. It is also connected to the real physical plant in real-time thereby making the plant operable remotely. We demonstrate this by connecting PlantXR to our SWaT testbed in real-time. PlantXR allows us to do a lot of things that are infeasible in a physical testbed scenario. These things are-

• Training plant operators before accessing the real plant through gamified challenges inside a virtual recreation of the plant.
• Real time physical monitoring of the CPS, such as being telepresent and teleoperating the plant remotely from anywhere in the world (Virtual Reality HMI - Human Machine Interface)
• Visualizing historian data logs and path of attacks which is helpful during post-incident analysis.
• Visualizing the defense mechanism that kicks in when attacks are detected, in hybrid cyber-physical virtual space.
• Asset/Inventory Management and Maintenance through remote diagnostics.
• Visualizing dangerous scenarios such as floods, explosions that are possible consequences of Cyber-Physical attacks.
• Redesigning and evaluating the architecture of future plants for better security by design and ergonomics.
• Connecting to Digital Twins for simulating plant behavior and performing automated security assessments at scale (thereby incentivizing operators to find flaws and bolster security).

PlantXR also provides an easier yet reliable way to simulate hands-on training for general purposes without exposing trainees to risk of hazardous substances or damaging the equipment that contains them, for improving workplace health and safety. PlantXR will be valuable to Critical Chemical Infrastructures (CCIs) to facilitate scenarios which were infeasible without the use of XR technology. These scenarios are-

• Visualize and interact with Operations, Security, Faults, and Attacks in an immersive and unified pictorial interface.
• Collaborative Teleoperation - Physically distant multi-user teams colocated in the same virtual scene for faster training and resolution of complex problems.
• Training Scenarios (pre-configured and auto-generated) for efficient onboarding for new employees / retraining for regular operators.
• Visual Forensics of past datasets for quick reconnaissance, attack flows, attacker’s intentions and system’s vulnerabilities.
• Instantly teleport to the faulty / attacked region of the plant and figure out the issue.
• Digital twins in Virtual Reality together for attack scenario preparation.
• Testing future plant architectures in a virtual environment (security by design)
  

Results

One result of the pilot of our project is the improved cyber-physical security readiness of plant operators by equipping them with a cyber-physical grasp of the plant. With PlantXR also , real-time, design phase, as well as post-incident analysis can all be equipped to better identify instances of complex physical damage arising from cyber attacks, which are easily overlooked.

The plant can be designed to recreate the real plant in its original arrangement so that any training done within can be adapted to real world practice. This will help the trainees remember and develop muscle memory for the spatial steps required for a certain routine, e.g. in case of an emergency, to which part of the plant should they go and what they should do. Spatial and visual memory is stronger than instructions on a manual, and a virtual training does not interfere with plant operation and several instances can be run in parallel as long as there is sufficient computing equipment.

PlantXR can also be used with any plant arrangement to allow a broad god-mode monitoring. The user is equipped with a virtual laser pointer which can be directed at any component to display its live value, both the real value and the PLC value on the screen. Any attacks or anomalies to the plant components will show as a red color covering the affected components for easy detection. This configuration gives a broad understanding of live or recorded plant sessions, and is effective in giving rough knowledge of how all the components interact or are affected by anomalies as one unit.

A map navigation is also given in the heads-up display configuration, allowing the user to quickly move to a different part of the plant for urgent inspection and monitoring. The virtual laser pointer can be used to point to a spot on the map to teleport the user to that location.

References

• Alt, T., Edelmann, M.: Augmented reality for industrial applications: a new approach to increase productivity. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Work with Display Units, pp. 380–381 (2002)
• Goh, Jonathan, Sridhar Adepu, Khurum Nazir Junejo, and Aditya Mathur. "A dataset to support research in the design of secure water treatment systems". 2016 International Conference on Critical Information Infrastructures Security, pp. 88-99. Springer, 2016.
• Shrivastava, S. (2019). Abstract/Bio. [online] Web.stanford.edu. Available at: http://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/190508.html [Accessed 9 Aug. 2019].
• Shrivastava, S. (2019). Siddhant Shrivastava: Virtual and Mixed Reality. [online] Tisch.nyu.edu. Available at: https://tisch.nyu.edu/itp/events/spring-2019/siddhant-shrivastava--virtu... [Accessed 9 Aug. 2019].
• Adepu, S., and Mathur, A. “Distributed attack detection in a water treatment plant: method and case study”. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2018.
• iTrust. (2019). iTrust Labs_Dataset Info - iTrust. [online] Available at: https://itrust.sutd.edu.sg/itrust-labs_datasets/dataset_info/ [Accessed 9 Aug. 2019]
• Microsoft (2019). Using the HoloLens Emulator - Mixed Reality. [online] Available at:https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/mixed-reality/using-the-hololen... [Accessed 9 Aug. 2019].
• Mathur A. and Tippenhauer N. O., “SWaT: Secure Water Treatment Testbed for Research and Training in the Design of Industrial Control Systems,” IEEE Computer Society International Conference on Computers, Software & Applications (COMPSAC 2016)
• Ofek, E., Grubert, J., Pahud, M., Phillips, M. and Kristensson, P., 2020. Towards A Practical Virtual Office For Mobile Knowledge Workers. [online] Microsoft Research. Available at: <https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/towards-a-practical... [Accessed 2 August 2020].