Combining safety and security analysis for industrial collaborative automation systems

Abstract

In collaborative automation systems, providing both security and safety assessments are getting increasingly important. As IoT systems gain momentum in the industrial domain, experts stress their concerns about security and safety. Improperly or carelessly deployed and configured systems hide security threats, and even raise issues on safety, as their behavior can threaten human life. The cloud based back-ends are getting used for processing sensor data – on the other hand, legacy equipment, which may contain sensitive information, is made interoperable with broader infrastructure. Safety risks can be triggered by attacks on the backend and confidential information is at risks by attacks on legacy equipment. In order to maintain safe and secure operations, safety and cyber-security assessment methods have been established. There is an increased demand in modern industrial systems to perform these regularly. These methods however require a lot of time and effort to complete. A solution to this problem would be combining the assessments. This requires that proper safety and security analysis methods must be selected – those that have compatible elements. In this paper we propose a method that combines the elements of existing methodologies, in order to make the safety and security analysis process more effective. Furthermore, we present a case study, where we verified the combined methodology.