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Calling for Resilience

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Tough times demand tough measures.  A recent convergence of three disruptive forces on industrial automation calls for resilience, according to the report of a recent survey from Claroty, The Global State Of Industrial Cybersecurity 2021: Resilience Amid Disruption.  These forces are: an increase in ransomware attacks, accelerated digital transformation, and a growing trend towards working remotely. What’s needed is more investment in improved technology and the hiring and training of staff, according to the majority of the 1,100 IT and OT (operations technology) security professionals interviewed.

The number of ransomware attacks sustained by industrial enterprises, and the costs involved, are staggering.  A full 80% of the companies surveyed were hit, including a breach of their OT/ICS (industrial control systems) for more than half of them.  Over 60% paid the ransom, with an average payment of around $500,000 USD, and over $5,000,000 for some.  That doesn’t count the cost of lost production downtime, which for the companies surveyed ranges from tens of thousands to millions of dollars per hour.

At the same time, the need for networking industrial data is stronger than ever.  Fully 90% of these companies report that they sped up adoption of digital transformation since the start of the pandemic, and don’t anticipate turning back.  Adding to that, working remotely has become a new normal.  Just 21% of the companies surveyed had their full staff working onsite in 2021, and only 27% expect to have everyone back working onsite after the pandemic.

Secure data communications are vital

Taken together these trends indicate a strong demand for secure data communications.  Claroty, the industrial cyber security company that sponsored the survey, offers five technical and procedural  recommendations.  For data communications, the report said maintaining proper segmentation between OT and IT networks can be a highly effective defense against ransomware:

“There are many business processes and applications that need to communicate across the IT/OT boundary, so organizations need to ensure this is done in a secure way. Ensuring an organization’s OT network and assets are isolated from IT in a manner that aligns with segmentation best practices can be a highly effective means of stopping the lateral spread of ransomware and other malware from IT to OT.”

Responding to this need for network isolation, Skkynet offers a wide range of secure solutions for in-plant, OT/IT, and cloud connectivity.  Industrial enterprises large and small have come to recognize the value of our secure-by-design approach that gives them full access to their production data while keeping their OT networks secure behind DMZs and fully closed firewalls.  Skkynet’s software and services answer the call for resilience.

Data Sharing Needed for Sustainable Energy

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Sustainable energy can be profitable. That, in a nutshell, is the finding of a GreenBiz Research survey presented in the 2019 Corporate Energy & Sustainability Progress Report from Schneider Electric. And an important key to those profits is sharing data.

“Companies agree that sharing data is important, with those that share the most seeing significant benefit,” the report said. This importance of data sharing stands out in the context of the overall report findings, which are broken up into 5 main topics:

  • Funding: Executives that demonstrate ROI (return on investment) and provide strong leadership can overcome perceived obstacles, such as insufficient capital.
  • Data: The challenge is to ensure the quality of collected data, and to share it effectively.
  • Goals: Setting public targets or goals for energy conservation and sustainability drives motivation and success.
  • Energy: Strategic sourcing optimizes usage, yielding significant cost savings in a volatile energy landscape.
  • Technology: Energy efficiency and renewables, based on data-driven technologies, are a leading source of ROI.

Ultimately, for a sustainable energy project to succeed, it must provide a solid return on investment. This report affirms the experience of our customers in wind and solar that the better the quality of their data, and the more they are able to share it, the higher their ROI.

For example, a wind farm doesn’t operate in isolation. In addition to the electrical power it sends to the grid, each wind turbine also sends data for its rotor speed, operating state, power output, and more out to control engineers and automated systems to optimize performance. This data can also be integrated with other data arriving in real time. Weather and climate conditions can be introduced, along with real-time market pricing, to generate live, real-time cost/benefit analyses.

Seeking ways to share data

Sharing data like this takes both cooperation and technology. The various players involved have to agree on what to share and how. Reviewing last year’s survey, the report noted that “respondents indicated that 80% of their companies had energy and sustainability data collection projects underway.” And this year “the research finds that more companies are now seeking the most efficient ways to share the data that has been collected.”

We are pleased to see this growing level of awareness of the need for data sharing. At the same time, we actively encourage executives, managers and engineers who are looking for more efficiency in their data sharing practices to consider our approach. It could be just what they need to boost the ROI of their sustainable energy projects.

Tech Talk and Action in IIoT Data Communications

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Is summer over already?  It may be hard to accept, but on my morning walks the sun rises later each day, the wind is more brisk, and the leaves are turning yellow and red.  Before fall arrives in earnest, I’d like to share a bountiful harvest of summer activity here at Skkynet.  While most of the world was on holiday and taking it easy for a few weeks, our technical team took the opportunity to jot down some of their thoughts on our specialty: data communication for Industrial IoT.

In this first installment of a new series of Tech Talk blogs, lead developer and company CEO Andrew Thomas discusses IIoT security, data protocols, best practices, and common pitfalls.  He starts by introducing the unique requirements for Industial IoT, and he challenges the assumptions that lead to inherently insecure system design.  He then discusses each of the data protocols often suggested for use in the IIoT: UDP, MQTT, OPC UA, and REST, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of each.  The best approach, he argues, exhibits the best qualities of these and more, as well as supporting edge and fog processing and public, private, or hybrid clouds.

This is the thinking that underlies SkkyHub, Skkynet’s secure-by-design approach to Industrial IoT.  Combined with our ETK and Cogent DataHub, the result is Industrial IoT that actually works.  You can install it in green field or brownfield projects, and connect to new or existing systems, use open protocols, and provide secure, robust, real-time performance at speeds not much slower than Internet propagation speeds.  And it is available today, right now.

This fall we are putting SkkyHub, DataHub, and ETK on display and into play in several arenas.  We will be at conferences and trade shows in North America, Europe and the Far East, including OPC Foundation Seminars in Vancouver and Toronto, Industry of Things World 2017 in Berlin, Sensors Midwest in Chicago, ARM TechCon in Santa Clara, SPS Drives in Nuremberg, and SCF in Tokyo.  If you are attending any of these, please stop by.

In the field, SkkyHub customers are enjoying the benefits of the service, and some have expressed an interest in sharing their experiences.  We will be blogging about those soon.  Meanwhile, the tech team has shfited back into development mode, and we expect some exciting news from them soon as well.  Summer may be winding down, but Skkynet continues to move rapidly ahead.

Industrial IoT that Works

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Data Communication for Industrial IoT – Conclusion

The Industrial IoT holds a lot of promise for improving productivity and cutting costs for industrial systems.  Yet the IIoT is different from both the consumer IoT and traditional SCADA systems.  In particular, data communications have unique requirements that you need to keep in mind if you are planning to implement an IIoT project that works well.

Re-Thinking Assumptions

Because industrial data communication was developed independently of the Internet, the merging of these two technologies requires a re-thinking of some basic assumptions.  The most secure and reliable approach is to focus on the data, and to allow access to the data only.  Accessing a device means that the device is open to an attack.  Accessing the network leaves the network exposed, even if you use a VPN.  A more secure-by-design approach allows the data source and the data user to make outbound connections to a public or private cloud service that holds only the data.  This keeps all plant firewall ports closed, and provides a secure spot independent of the plant where the data can be accessed by authorized users.

Data Protocol Problems

A number of data communications protocols have been proposed for the IIoT, each with its advantages and drawbacks.  UDP works for VOIP and streaming media, but it lacks the accuracy and completeness so necessary for good industrial communication.  MQTT offers a publish/subscribe mechanism and many-to-many connectivity, but lacks a standard data protocol and the ability to handle messages intelligently.  OPC UA is a good choice for in-plant connectivity, but suffers from the traditional server/client design that requires an open firewall port to connect from the Internet.  REST over HTTP is popular for general IoT applications, but has issues with bandwidth, latency, scalability, symmetry, and robustness when faced with the high speed and large number of connection requirements of the IIoT.  To implement security Blockchain may sound good in theory, but a closer look shows why it will fail in practice.

A New Approach

Clearly, a new approach specifically designed for IIoT is needed.  This approach should use the robust foundation of TCP, the security of a publish/subscribe model like MQTT, and the in-plant connectivity of OPC UA.  Its bandwidth use, latency, and scalability should far exceed RESTful HTML.  This new approach should support edge processing, and in fact, provide the means for edge processing, cloud processing, and fog processing, as dictated by the circumstances on the ground or in the field.  It should be available as a public cloud, a private cloud, or a hybrid combination of public and private clouds.

Something That Actually Works

Most important, this approach should actually work.  You should be able to install it in greenfield or brownfield projects.  It should connect to existing systems, use open protocols, and provide secure, robust, real-time performance at speeds not much slower than Internet propagation speeds.  And it should be available today, right now.  If you’re interested, give us a call.

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Is OPC UA the Answer for IIoT?

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Part 9 of Data Communication for Industrial IoT

OPC Unified Architecture (UA) is the latest standard from the OPC Foundation. Its purpose is to unify the OPC Classic standards of Data Access (DA), Alarms and Events (A&E), and Historical Data Access (HDA) into a single, extensible framework. At the same time OPC UA offers improved networking support, a more sophisticated security model, platform independence, and comprehensive information modeling.

The OPC UA spec allows for implementation across a wide range of hardware platforms and operating systems. The different UA implementations that are possible within this extensible and flexible framework all share a common core UA functionality and interoperability.

The UA standard has been expanded to include or interface with a large number of industrial data models, and it has been chosen as a communication layer standard for Industrie 4.0.  There is considerable conversation about UA serving as a data communications protocol for the Industrial IoT.

As we see it, OPC UA does its job very well.  It works well to provide secure connectivity between clients and servers on an industrial network.

An open firewall port

However, following the traditional industrial client-server architecture OPC UA cannot ensure the complete isolation of the plant network when connecting to the IIoT.  To access data from a UA server, an OPC client outside the plant network needs an open firewall port.  As we explained previously, this exposes the plant network to attack.

Developers are aware of this limitation in OPC UA, which is why we are now seeing a rise in UA-to-Something gateway software.  The most common seems to be OPC UA to MQTT.  The idea is excellent in principle – use UA for in-plant communication and an IIoT protocol for communication to the cloud.  In practise, be careful which IIoT protocol you choose.  I cover the most popular ones in other posts.

Unless OPC UA gets an upgrade to a pure push technology (where the server makes an outbound connection to the client), it does not seem practical to use UA for the cloud segment of the data path.  OPC UA is going to own the industrial plant, but IIoT needs something else.

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Access the Data, Not the Network

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Part 4 of Data Communication for Industrial IoT

The idea of a client/server relationship where the server is the source of information is ingrained strongly into the typical software available today.  As a system design that is very difficult to eliminate.  Some companies try to make this into a “secure” mechanism by trying to add a layer of security on top of the client/server connection.  That layer of security is generally a VPN or (in rare cases) a point-to-point tunnel like SSH tunneling.  Since a VPN is typically the answer, it deserves a little more examination.

The purpose of a VPN is to create a virtual IP subnet that is shared only by computers that are authorized to join that subnet.  Packets transmitted on the subnet are automatically encrypted, even if neither the sender nor receiver is consciously using encryption.  That definitely makes it harder for an outsider to intercept communication among members of the VPN.

Inside the security perimeter

The big concern with a VPN is that once a computer or device is a member of the VPN, it is effectively like being on a local area network containing all other members of the VPN.  If a computer is inside the VPN it is inside the trusted perimeter.  This exposes the other VPN members to attack from within, even if they are safe from attack from without.  This is similar to what happened in a big box store in 2013, where attackers gained access to the LAN by breaching a third-party company who had “secure” access to the store’s internal network.  The larger the number of computers on a VPN, the more points of entry through the secure perimeter you have.

In the Internet of Things, security concerns have been pushing away from VPNs for a while.  A blog posting at Microsoft from 2013 takes a look at VPNs and the issues surrounding them.  If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a read.

When we are talking about collections of devices, plant control systems or data acquisition systems on a larger network a VPN might seem like a compelling solution, but it inevitably exposes your network to attack, either due to a compromise in a VPN member, a compromise in the VPN server or simple theft of network credentials.  Once you have any of those, every machine on the VPN becomes a sitting duck.

There is no valid reason why you should provide external access to the whole network any more than you should provide external access to an embedded device.  In exactly the same way that you protect your devices by having them transmit data outbound to a middleman you can protect any data source, like an industrial control system, using the same mechanism.  You can have remote access to your data without exposing your internal network.

In the world of IIoT you should aim to access your data, not the network.

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