Blurry Box Encryption Scheme and Why it Matters to Industrial IoT
5.11 USE CASE: MICROGRID CONTROLS
Intelligent microgrids require the intelligent sharing of data for energy-efficient and reliable power distribution. Their controls depend on software-enabled functions and form part of a critical infrastructure that is highly exposed to cyber-attacks. Countermeasures include protection against reverse engineering, integrity protection from secure boot to secure firmware updates, and flexible licensing to enable features and measure their use reliably.
5.12 USE CASE: TEXTILE INDUSTRY
In the textile industry, embroidery machines are a common sight in the production of clothes, shoes, high-tech wearables, or industrial textiles for seat heating or antennas. Factories often use multiple machines in one location.
The challenge for machine vendors is to prevent the pirating of complete machines. Their control software contains the know-how needed for high-quality, flexible embroidering at high efficiency. The threat is mostly due to the extremely competitive textile industry itself. Machines are made with a set of features; their vendors offer a basic model at competitive low prices and sell more sophisticated functions – often software-realized – on top. This makes it important that factories do not, for example, buy several basic machines and only one with the full feature set that they then copy to the others.
Buyers of textiles face additional challenges: they provide production data – so called punch data – to the factories producing their fabrics on these machines. Unscrupulous factory owners could run extra shifts and produce additional wares for the grey market. The purchasers’ data needs to be controlled, from the original CAD design to the embroidery machine, which also includes controlling how many products made from the designs.
This can be seen as a general“ digitization” or“ Industrie 4.0” use case. It shows the great importance of protecting production data, which is essential for other areas as well, for example, additive manufacturing( 3D printing) or technology data, in the form of specific parameters for machines.
With software protection, flexible feature licensing, production data encryption, and secure storage of encryption keys and options, all of these challenges can be solved.
There are many more use cases. The chosen examples reveal the commercial relevance of the topic and the benefits of software protection. The mechanisms according to Kerckhoffs’ Principle published here allow developers and manufacturers to understand how much protection they need and why they should not put all of their trust into“ security through obscurity.”
IIC Journal of Innovation- 17-