October 20, 2016 – The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) with its Research Department Innovative Factory Systems and Wibu-Systems have developed a holistic security concept for the protection of industrial manufacturers. The S4SmartPro – "Security for Smart Production" – project was supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research, and was completed in only 24 months.
The two teams of experts came together to investigate effective protection mechanisms for different types of threats and implement a set of system safeguards for the DFKI prototype production line at SmartFactoryKL. The results can be emulated by any stakeholder who wishes to apply Industry 4.0 standards and make the switch to intelligent production technologies.
From a technical standpoint, RFID readers were adopted for OPC UA-based communications in the key finder prototype production line of SmartFactoryKL. All security-critical private keys were stored in CodeMeter dongles equipped with a smart card chip onboard. Even though proprietary technology was used for secure storage, the OPC UA communication is 100% compliant with the open ISO standards of OPC UA. In addition, relevant production data were signed and stored in the RFID tag for a completely tamperproof concept. An app for tablets was used to verify and authenticate the signatures.
The use of open standards, such as OPC UA, symmetric encryption with AES, asymmetric encryption with ECC, ECIES, and RSA, low cost RFID tags with medium memory capacity as well as standard operating systems for embedded, cyber physical, and cloud-based systems ensures interoperability and enables the implementation of the same set of variables in many different applications.