Research Outputs
Establishing a Chain of Trust in a Sporadically Connected Cyber-Physical System
Drone based applications have progressed significantly in recent years across many industries, including agriculture. This paper proposes a sporadically connected cyber-physical system for assisting winemakers and minimizing the travel time to remote and poorly connected infrastructures. A set of representative diseases and conditions, which will be monitored by land-bound sensors in combination with multispectral images, is identified. To collect accurate data, a trustworthy and secured communication of the drone with the sensors and the base station should be established. We propose to use an Internet of Things framework for establishing a chain of trust by securely onboarding drones, sensors and base station, and providing self-adaptation support for the use case. Furthermore, we perform a security analysis of the use case for identifying potential threats and security controls that should be in place for mitigating them.
Monitoring Industry 4.0 Applications for Security and Safety Standard Compliance
In Industry 4.0 independent entities shall inter-operate to allow flexible and customized production. To assure the parties that individual components are secured to inter-operate, we investigate automated standard compliance. The standard compliance is defined based on given sets of security and safety requirements from which are derived measurable indicator points. Those reflect configurations of systems recommended by security, safety or legally relevant standards and guidelines, which help to demonstrate the state of compliance. We propose in this paper an initial approach to automate such assessment when components are inter-operating with each other by using a monitoring and standard compliance verification framework. This will assure the parties that services or devices within their organizations operate in a secure and standard compliant way, without compromising the underlying infrastructure.
A Lightweight Authentication Mechanism for M2M Communications in Industrial IoT Environment
In the emerging industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) era, machine-to-machine (M2M) communication technology is considered as a key underlying technology for building IIoT environments, where devices (e.g., sensors, actuators, and gateways) are enabled to exchange information with each other in an autonomous way without human intervention. However, most of the existing M2M protocols that can be also used in the IIoT domain provide security mechanisms based on asymmetric cryptography resulting in high computational cost. As a consequence, the resource-constrained IoT devices are not able to support them appropriately and thus, many security issues arise for the IIoT environment. Therefore, lightweight security mechanisms are required for M2M communications in IIoT in order to reach its full potential. As a step toward this direction, in this paper, we propose a lightweight authentication mechanism, based only on hash and XOR operations, for M2M communications in IIoT environment. The proposed mechanism is characterized by low computational cost, communication, and storage overhead, while achieving mutual authentication, session key agreement, device's identity confidentiality, and resistance against the following attacks: replay attack, man-in-the-middle attack, impersonation attack, and modification attack.
Connected cars — Threats, vulnerabilities and their impact
The growing demand for interoperability between system components within a connected car has led to new security challenges in automotive development. The existing components, based on established technology, are often being combined to form such a connected car. For such established technologies, individual, often sector specific threat and vulnerability catalogs exist. The aim of this paper is to identify blocks of established technologies in a connected car and to consolidate the corresponding threat and vulnerability catalogs relevant for the individual constituent components. These findings are used to estimate the impact on specific system components and subsystems to identify the most crucial components and threats.
Smart industrial indoor farming - Technical and societal challenges
Population growth and food development are two of the major challenges for society. While smart farming can help, available arable land is restricted. Smart industrial indoor farming has the potential to increase agricultural production while also reducing resources usage. To guarantee a reliable food supply, we need to ensure a dependable system, which protects not only the plants, but also the Intellectual property (IP). We give an overview about the challenges on agriculture, available indoor farming systems and standards for smart farming. We evaluate the standards for applicability towards indoor farming and present a use case for a smart industrial indoor farming system. To assure a dependable system, we present a methodology to analyze the system and achieve a trade-off between different dependability attributes.
Risk Management and Standard Compliance for Cyber-Physical Systems of Systems
The Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud technologies are increasingly implemented in the form of Cyber-Physical Systems of Systems (CPSoS) for the railway sector. In order to satisfy the security requirements of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), domainspecific risk identification assessment procedures have been developed. Threat modelling is one of the most commonly used methods for threat identification for the security analysis of CPSoS and is capable of targeting various domains. This paper reports our experience of using a risk management framework identify the most critical security vulnerabilities in CPSoS in the domain and shows the broader impact this work can have on the domain of safety and security management. Moreover, we emphasize the application of common analytical methods for cyber-security based on international industry standards to identify the most vulnerable assets. These will be applied to a meta-model for automated railway systems in the concept phase to support the development and deployment of these systems. Furthermore, it is the first step to create a secure and standard complaint system by design.
A recommendation for suitable technologies for an indoor farming framework
Facing food insecurity and overuse of resources due to effects of climate change, humanity needs to find new ways to secure food production and produce close to consumers. Vertical farming, where plants are grown in vertical arrays inside buildings with help of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) components, could contribute to solving this issue. Such systems integrate heterogeneous devices on different computing layers and acquire a lot of data to monitor and optimize the production process. We created an indoor testing unit in which growing conditions can be monitored and controlled to optimize growth of microgreens. This setup includes an Indoor Farming Support as a Service (IFSaaS) prototype that provides safe and secure monitoring and controlling, as well as self-adaption of an indoor farming system. In this article we provide information about the combination of most suitable technologies.