Cybersecurity for IIOT and Industry 4.0

Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity is the protecting of one from cyber threats in systems, networks or any digital application.

Three main goals of cybersecurity are:

• Confidentiality: Keeping confidential information private.
• Integrity: Ensuring the consistency, precision and credibility of the information.
• Availability: Ensuring the information should be available to approved entities consistently and readily.

Reference: Security Challenges on the Way Towards Smart Manufacturing , H. He, IoT Security Foundation White Paper, April 2016. Retrieved May 2021 online.

• Confidentiality: Eavesdropping attacks due to fake reader will have the ability to read confidential tag data
• Integrity: Poisoning methods that compromise data or the models that use the data could have significant effects on the physical integrity of the plant or the quality of its output
• Availability: Attacks such as Denial of Service (DoS) can deny the availability of assets such as a network, a system device, or any computational resources to legitimate users and has the potential to shutdown manufacturing process for extended period of time.

 

Introduction:

• Manufacturers use RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology to track and handle thousands of supplies.
• RFID plays an important role in IIOT and Industry 4.0 in the context of smart manufacturing.

Problem - Eavesdropping Attacks:

• RFID readers sends request to RFID tags to check their identity information.
• Reader reads information sent by the tag and verify it with the stored data in the server.
• However, most of the RFID tags cannot discriminate between valid RFID reader and fake RFID reader.
• Attacker with fake RFID reader will be able to sniff out the confidential information.

Solution:

• Eavesdropping attacks can be defended through the encryption of the RFID communication channel.
• Another simple remedy is to avoid storing data on the tag unnecessarily.
• Secure transmission of tags' IDs can be achieved using anti-collision protocols

-Mitrokotsa, Aikaterini, Melanie R. Rieback, and Andrew S. Tanenbaum. "Classifying RFID attacks and defenses." Information Systems Frontiers 12.5 (2010): 491-505
 
-Quan, Cheng-Hao, Won-Kee Hong, and Hie-Cheol Kim. "Performance analysis of tag anti-collision algorithms for RFID systems." International Conference on Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2006.

Reference: Li, Xuran, et al. "An analytical study on eavesdropping attacks in wireless nets of things." Mobile Information Systems 2016 (2016). Accessed online.