Industrial IoT Dataflow and Security Architecture
"Ensuring that the devices and systems connected to the internet are secure is a key to ensuring the safety and reliability of industrial operations."– Dr. Richard Soley, Executive Director, Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC)
The sheer scale and complexity of IIoT demands a systematic approach to secure the system architecture. When the degree of complexity is high, decomposing the security paradigm into subdomains helps to manage and mitigate risks. This decomposition is particularly useful to use cases involving several technologies, and spanning across multiple organizational boundaries (a common scenario in IIoT).
Industrial systems last for decades. This further necessitates to plan for protecting industrial IoT systems and assets against both current and future threats.
This chapter presents in-depth insights into IIoT (big) data flows and IIoT reference architectures, and introduces the industrial internet security framework developed by the IIC. These discussions subsequently lead the reader to a simplified four-tier IIoT security model, which decomposes the essential IIoT security measures into four main layers.
But, before getting into those details, we shall present a primer on IIoT attacks, countermeasures, and threat modeling.
The main topics covered in this chapter are as follows:
- A primer on IIoT attacks, countermeasures, and threat models
- Trustworthiness of an IIoT system
- Industrial big data pipeline and architectures
- Building blocks of the industrial IoT security architecture