A Short Introduction into Trustworthiness
involved in defining the appropriate
trustworthiness implementation.
T RUSTWORTHINESS AND IT/OT
C ONVERGENCE
For example, an oil pipeline may incorporate
a comprehensive set of sensors that
instantly report any leaks via a WAN
network. Finding and closing even small
leaks as quickly as possible will significantly
increase safety efforts to protect humans
and the environment. By keeping the
functional downtime low during the repair of
a leak, the reliability is also increased. But if
a hacker attack shuts down the monitor
center because the network security system
failed, then safety would be compromised.
Resilience in this case would initiate a
permanent manual surveillance of the
pipeline until the IoT sensor network is
reestablished. Without such a backup plan
to maintain pipeline safety after the IoT
sensors were rendered unusable, a planned
physical attack could create much larger
damage to the pipeline, to the environment
and to people.
Trustworthiness is essential to industrial IoT
systems that combine informational
technology (IT) with operational technology
(OT) and can use data, sensors and actuators
to impact people and the physical
environment. The consequences of acting
badly can lead to loss of human life, long-
term impact on the environment,
interruption of critical infrastructure, as well
as other consequences including disclosure
of sensitive data, destruction of equipment,
economic loss and damage to reputation.
Additional drivers include concerns over
regulatory compliance as well as the fear of
liability and litigation.
Designing an Industrial IoT system requires
the interweaving of IT and OT principles, 7
frequently conflicting with IT and OT
“traditions.” Trustworthiness can help to
describe such conflicts. As shown in Figure 2,
security and privacy are part of the IT world
Figure 2: Bringing IT and OT Trustworthiness concerns together in the industrial IoT
7
See definition of IT/OT Convergence, Industrial Internet Consortium: Vocabulary, V2.1, August 2018,
https://www.iiconsortium.org/vocab
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IIC Journal of Innovation