Assessing the Security of OPC UA Deployments

Abstract: To address the increasing security demands of industrial deployments, OPC UA is one of the first industrial protocols explicitly designed with security in mind. However, deploying it securely requires a thorough configuration of a wide range of options. Thus, assessing the security of OPC UA deployments and their configuration is necessary to ensure secure operation, most importantly confidentiality and integrity of industrial processes. In this work, we present extensions to the popular Metasploit Framework to ease network-based security assessments of OPC UA deployments. To this end, we discuss methods to discover OPC UA servers, test their authentication, obtain their configuration, and check for vulnerabilities. Ultimately, our work enables operators to verify the (security) configuration of their systems and identify potential attack vectors.