Vulnerability Assessment of Industrial and Agricultural Control Systems within the IoT Framework

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) increasingly rely on Internet of Things (IoT) communication systems to forward information among all their components mainly through wireless channels. The agricultural sector evolved from a manual occupation to a highly technological environment that exploits a wide variety of sensors and automated machines. The evaluation of cybersecurity issues in wireless channels becomes crucial. In this context, a very useful tool to perform vulnerability assessments and penetration testing are Software Defined Radio (SDR). In this work, we highlight the importance of properly evaluating the security level of ICS focusing on the agricultural scenario and propose an SDR-based framework to assess the cybersecurity of these systems. We consider two use cases: an agricultural vehicle that can move autonomously or be remotely managed by an authorised operator through a proper controller; a sensor network deployed in a rural area and composed of Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN)-based sensors. We show how SDR can be used to perform a wide set of attacks and how to evaluate their potential impact on the considered systems.