The Power of Industrial Cybersecurity
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The Power of Industrial Cybersecurity Dr. Andreas Kind
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ince decades operational environments like factories, train systems, energy networks and city infrastructures have been equipped with dedicated communication and control technology that addresses the specific needs for timing, reliability, availability, and safety. Such operational technology (OT) for industrial equipment, assets, processes and events is increasingly combined with information technology (IT). Strictly isolated before, OT domains are now being connected with the back and middle office for business process integration and analytics. Furthermore, IT best practice and technology components are increasingly being applied in the OT domain, such as certificate-based authentication and secure communication. This industrial digitalization opens new attack vectors for operational environments – but has also created new approaches for holistic security concepts for human-cyber-physical systems that address all system actors and the full lifecycle of system components. Unfortunately, too often publications focus on individual security incidents. Like folklore, stories about attacks on operational IT (no matter whether observed in the field or only in laboratory conditions) are passed down and shared broadly, while ignoring the actual advances in industrial cybersecurity. In this article we, thus, want to highlight new powerful developments in industrial cybersecurity for converged OT/IT environments, particularly in the context of machine and device identities.
Human-cyber-physical Systems In general, cyber-physical systems connect the processes of physical devices and machines with computing technology. The conditions of the physical processes are measured by sensors, then provided as input to a controller that evaluates the input according to a digital model of the physical process. The output of the controller 18 DIGITALE WELT 1 | 2021
is a modification that is applied to the physical process via an actuator. This control loop often runs autonomously following real-time requirements, which make human interaction impossible. Operational personnel are, however, needed to configure and manage the control loop with a human-machine interface (HMI), which can be in the form of a monitoring or engineering system. Human-cyber-physical systems [1] are potentially vulnerable to cybersecurity attack vectors on the social level, targeting the mental model of the operational personnel in front of the HMI as well as on the digital level, targeting the digital model and controller (Figure 1). In the latter cases, the approach of an attacker is to enforce a disconnect between the mental model (i.e., what the operator thinks is happening) from what is actually happening in the digital and physical world. In the former case, the approach is to enforce a disconnect between the digital model (i.e., what the control system has as dynamic representation of the physical processes) from what is actually happening in the physical world. In both cases, the larger objective
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