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General Kenneth Nichols and the Manhattan Project
Nichols
The Oak Ridger has published the latest in a series of articles about General Kenneth D. Nichols, the Manhattan Project, and the 1954 Atomic Energy Act. The series has been produced by Nichols’ grandniece Barbara Rogers Scollin and Oak Ridge (Tenn.) city historian David Ray Smith. Gen. Nichols (1907–2000) was the district engineer for the Manhattan Engineer District during the Manhattan Project.
As Smith and Scollin explain, Nichols “had supervision of the research and development connected with, and the design, construction, and operation of, all plants required to produce plutonium-239 and uranium-235, including the construction of the towns of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Richland, Washington. The responsibility of his position was massive as he oversaw a workforce of both military and civilian personnel of approximately 125,000; his Oak Ridge office became the center of the wartime atomic energy’s activities.”
Fan Zhang, J. Wesley Hines, Jamie Coble (Univ of Tennessee)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 279-284
Cybersecurity of industrial control systems (ICS) is an essential research area due to increasing critical asset-targeted cyberattacks and their potential severe consequences. Current intrusion detection systems (IDS) are primarily based on network traffic monitoring, which may be not sufficient for detecting comprehensive and carefully prepared cyberattacks. In this situation, the combination of empirical monitoring with statistical anomaly detection technique is a promising and feasible approach to early detection of ICS cyberattack that takes advantage of numerous and various sensors used in industry; this may provide a complementary approach to traditional network-based intrusion detection to improve coverage of detectable cyberattacks. The motivation of this study is to generate ICS intrusion data to study the use of empirical models for ICS cybersecurity. In this paper, a real-time ICS test bed, which includes a physical two-loop forced flow system, LabVIEW-based supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system, and Kali Linux-incorporated cyber network that conducts attacks within the local area network (LAN), is deployed to generate relevant data. Three cyberattacks scenarios are carried out in this paper, including packets sniffing with man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack; denial-of-service (DoS) attack to SCADA slave with spoofed IP address; and change command with spoofed SCADA master by MITM attack. Physical process data, including field sensor data, which represents industrial process data, are collected by the LabVIEW-based SCADA system. Network communication data are collected with Wireshark. The significance of this test bed is providing both industrial process data and network communication data of normal and under-attack situation, which will be useful in future empirical model based intrusion detection analysis. Future works will focus on improving the ICS test bed through integrating industrial protocols and collect more intrusion data for studying IDS.