Dynamic Access Control for Industrial Systems

Abstract: Industrial automation and control systems (IACS) are responsible for handling our most important infrastructures, providing electricity and clean water, producing medicine and food, along with many other services and products we take for granted. The continuous, safe and secure operation of such systems are obviously of great importance. Future iterations of IACS will look very different from the ones we use today. Modular and flexible systems are emerging, powered by technical advances in areas such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and motivated by fluctuating market demands and faster innovation cycles. Design strategies for dynamic manufacturing are increasingly being adopted. These advances have a fundamental impact on industrial systems at component as well as architectural level.As a consequence of the changing operational requirements, the methods used for protection of industrial systems must be revisited and strengthened. This for example includes access control, which is one of the fundamental cybersecurity mechanisms that is hugely affected by current developments within IACS. The methods currently used are static and coarse-grained and therefore not well suited for dynamic and flexible industrial systems. A transition in security model is required, from implicit trust towards zero-trust, supporting dynamic and fine-grained access control.This PhD thesis discusses access control for IACS in the age of Industry 4.0,focusing on dynamic and flexible manufacturing systems. The solutions presented are applicable at machine-to-machine as well as human-to-machine interactions, using a zero-trust strategy. An investigation of the current state of practice for industrial access control is provided as a starting point. Dynamic systems require equally dynamic access control policies, why several approaches on how dynamic access control can be achieved in industrial systems are developed and evaluated, covering strategies for policy formulations as well as mechanisms for authorization enforcement.