Abstract
Wireless communication has gained more interest in industrial automation due to flexibility, mobility, and cost reduction. Wireless systems, in general, require additional and different engineering and maintenance tasks, for example cryptographic key management. This is an important aspect that needs to be addressed before wireless systems can be deployed and maintained efficiently in the industry. In this paper, we take an holistic approach that addresses safety and security regardless of the underlying media. In our proposed framework we introduce security modules which can be retrofitted to provide end-to-end integrity and authentication measures by utilizing the black channel concept. With the proposed approach, we can extend and provide end-to-end security as well as functional safety using existing automation equipment and standards, such as Profisafe, Profinet IO, and WirelessHART. Furthermore, we improve the WirelessHART standard with periodic and deterministic downlink transmissions to enable efficient usage of wireless actuators, as well as improving the performance of functional safety protocols.
Highlights
The automation industry has shown a strong interest in migrating substantial parts of the traditionally wired industrial infrastructure to wireless technologies to improve flexibility, scalability, and efficiency, with a significant cost reduction
Several measurements have been performed on the proof-of-concept implementation with different settings of the burst rate TcyW H of the WirelessHART device given in (5), i.e., the period time of updates sent from the WirelessHART device, in order to measure the total achieved safety function response time
The improvement in jitter is expected to be in the same range as shown in the upper graphs of Figure 9 as downlink slots are allocated in advance
Summary
The automation industry has shown a strong interest in migrating substantial parts of the traditionally wired industrial infrastructure to wireless technologies to improve flexibility, scalability, and efficiency, with a significant cost reduction. The framework is based on the black channel [30] concept and provides end-to-end security using security modules and existing functional safety protocols. In order to address the issues with respect to safety and security, regardless of the type of media, i.e., wired or wireless, we propose a framework based on the principle of the black channel. Our proposed framework is based on the black channel and provides a general solution for end-to-end security and safety in wired/wireless networks and is transparent to the underlying transmission media. 4. Seamless integration of safe and secure wired/ wireless communication we demonstrate our proposed framework using existing automation equipment and standards, addressing safety and security, using Profinet IO, Profisafe, and WirelessHART. Other existing integration work or methods can be used as well, but will most probably not be beneficial to use with respect to safety, end-to-end security, as well as engineering and maintenance efforts of the latter
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