A Unified Architecture for Industrial IoT Security Requirements in Open Platform Communications

We present a unified communication architecture for security requirements in the industrial internet of things. Formulating security requirements in the language of OPC UA provides a unified method to communicate and compare security requirements within a heavily heterogeneous landscape of machines in the field. Our machine-readable data model provides a fully automatable approach for security requirement communication within the rapidly evolving fourth industrial revolution, which is characterized by high-grade interconnection of industrial infrastructures and self-configuring production systems. Capturing security requirements in an OPC UA compliant and unified data model for industrial control systems enables strong use cases within modern production plants and future supply chains. We implement our data model as well as an OPC UA server that operates on this model to show the feasibility of our approach. Further, we deploy and evaluate our framework within a reference project realized by 14 industrial partners and 7 research facilities within Germany.