Supporting the integration of new security features in embedded control devices through the digitalization of production

Abstract

Security is a vital property of Industrial Control Systems (ICS), especially in the context of critical infrastructure. In this work, we focus on distributed control devices for hydro-electric power plants. Much work has been done for specific lifecylce phases of distributed control devices such as development or operational phase. Our aim here is to consider the entire product lifecycle and the consequences of security feature implementations for a single lifecycle stage on other stages. At the same time, recent trends such as the digitization of production is an enabler of production process extensions that support the integration of such security features during the operational phase of a control devices. In particular, we propose a security concept that enables assurance of the integrity of software components and product configuration of other control devices in the same network. Moreover, we show how these concepts result in additional requirements for the production stages. We show how we meet these requirements and focus on a production process by extending previously proposed methods that enable the commissioning of secrets such as private keys during the manufacturing phase. We extend this process by extracting information about the configurations of the actually produced devices during production. Based on this information, the proposed security techniques can be integrated without considerable overhead for bootstrapping.