Let’s get QUIC Securing IP-based Industrial Protocols by Proxying

Industrial protocols have historically been optimized for functionality and performance without considering the embedding of solid security features. Smart grids constitute a clear example, as these critical infrastructures rely heavily on power system protocols for automation. However, increasing interconnection requirements have brought novel security challenges that are difficult to mitigate with isolation and legacy lightweight security approaches. Although new industrial protocol extensions address security issues, it could be infeasible to incorporate them into already deployed infrastructures. This work proposes a proxy-based solution designed for an existing SSH3 embodiment built on top of the QUIC protocol, offering standalone proxy mechanisms that are independent of established protocols. To accomplish this, we developed a reverse socket proxy implementation for SSH3. Then, we evaluated the latency overhead of our solution to assess its practicality in industrial environments. Our results have shown that, leveraging our QUIC-based proxy solution, we can achieve average latency improvements ranging between 16% and 40%.