Research Outputs
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.
Towards trustworthy end-to-end communication in industry 4.0
Industry 4.0 considers integration of IT and control systems with physical objects, software, sensors and connectivity in order to optimize manufacturing processes. It provides advanced functionalities in control and communication for an infrastructure that handles multiple tasks in various locations automatically. Automatic actions require information from trustworthy sources. Thus, this work is focused on how to ensure trustworthy communication from the edge devices to the backend infrastructure. We derive a meta-model based on RAMI 4.0, which is used to describe an end-to-end communication use case for an Industry 4.0 application scenario and to identify dependabilities in case of security challenges. Furthermore, we evaluate secure messaging protocols and the integration of Trusted Platform Module (TPM) as a root of trust for dataexchange. We define a set of representative measurable indicator points based on existing standards and use them for automated dependability detection within the whole system.