Toward an Ideal Access Control Strategy for Industry 4.0 Manufacturing Systems

Industrial control systems control and supervise our most important and critical infrastructures, such as power utilities, clean water plants and nuclear plants, as well as the manufacturing industries at the base of our economy. These systems are currently undergoing a transformation driven by the Industry 4.0 evolution, characterized by increased connectivity and flexibility. Consequently, the cybersecurity threat landscape for industrial control systems is evolving as well. Current strategies used for access control within industrial control systems are relatively rudimentary. It is evident that some of the emerging cybersecurity threats related to Industry 4.0 could be better mitigated using more fine-grained access control policies. In this article we discuss and describe a number of access control strategies that could be used within manufacturing systems. We evaluate the strategies in a simulation experiment, using a number of attack-scenarios. Moreover, a method is outlined for automatic policy-generation based on engineering-data, which is aligned with one of the best performing strategies.