Cyber Resilience for Critical Infrastructure
Over the past decade, the cybersecurity industry has tried to solve an operational technology (OT) problem on devices with an information technology (IT) solution on the network. The wiring closet with IT-OT convergence is complex plumbing. The weaknesses and vulnerabilities on OT devices must be addressed head-on by the suppliers with device and application security by design. The attack surface on autonomous and distributed cyber physical systems behooves a risk model based assessment of exposures and countermeasures.
The emerging standards for protection of critical infrastructures and cyber resilience, such as the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), IEC-62443, and NIST 800-53 specifications, are aimed at securing field communications and millions of OT devices in live production environments. The technologies and methods to consider include verifiable machine identities, efficient use of cost-effective cryptography, device lifecycle management, and supply chain provenance for over-the-air/wire updates. In the coming decade, transitive trust for enterprise digitalization will require establishing end-to-end trust in devices and data with mutual authentication, data protection, and risk classification (EU Artificial Intelligence Act) for use of AI/ML. The well-known vulnerabilities in the management, control, and data planes on field devices in existing infrastructures must be addressed with robust engineering to enable device-to-cloud connectivity.
The four pillars for digital trust in OT/IIoT/OT are security, availability, scalability, and interoperability between heterogeneous and multi-vendor devices in open, restricted, roaming, and air-gapped environments. The emerging edge and cloud based data driven analytics and insights will require (a) hardening brownfield and greenfield devices, (b) harvesting device data, (c) generating trustworthy training data for AI/ML engines at the edge or in the cloud, and (d) enriched metrics, events, logs, traces, and non-text data for SIEM and SCADA services. Symmera provides a distributed intelligent network (DIN) platform with software defined trust and automation to protect XIoT devices, empower analytics with enriched device intelligence, increase operational efficiencies with simplified workflows from factory to field, and reduce operational costs with IT-OT convergence.
