Secured SECS/GEM: A Security Mechanism for M2M Communication in Industry 4.0 Ecosystem

The manufacturing industry has been revolutionized by Industry 4.0, vastly improving the manufacturing process, increasing production quality and capacity. Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication protocols were developed to strengthen and bind this ecosystem by allowing machines to communicate with each other. The SECS/GEM protocol is at the heart of the manufacturing industry, thriving as a communication protocol and control system for years. It is a manufacturing equipment protocol used for equipment-host data communications. However, it is not without drawbacks, despite being a widely adopted communication protocol used by leading industries. SECS/GEM does not offer any type of security features as it was designed to work in a closed network. Such shortcomings in the protocol will allow attackers to steal secrets such as manufacturing processes by looking at recipes, perform reconnaissance prior to sabotage attempts, and can have severe implications on the entire industry. This paper proposes a mechanism to secure SECS/GEM data messages with AES-GCM encryption and evaluate the performance with the standard SECS/GEM protocol. The results from our evaluations showed that the proposed mechanism achieves data confidentiality and authenticity with a negligible overhead of 0.8 milliseconds and 0.37 milliseconds when sending and receiving a message, respectively, compared to the standard protocol.