Smart Manufacturing Connectivity for Brown-field Sensors Testbed
Module (TPM) as a hardware-based root of
trust (RoT). An endpoint without a correctly
implemented RoT will lack the ability to
establish confidence that it will behave as
intended.
The Testbed makes the factory floor more
retrofit-able
through
architectural
adaptations. The preferential scheme
implements a small change to an
architecture with a preexisting IO module
with sensors attached to it. The IO module is
simply replaced by the Y-Gateway which
delivers preprocessed sensor data to the
enterprise IT system in addition to the IO
module’s original task of feeding the real-
time control system with the sensor data. As
an alternative, an additional Y-Gateway
could be incorporated underneath an
existing PLC, where new sensors would be
attached to retrieve data not previously
available.
Communication security is mainly based on
OPC UA’s own security mechanisms. The
German Federal Office for Information
Security (BSI) has recently carried out an in-
depth security analysis of OPC UA; the
results of which confirm that “OPC UA was
designed with a focus on security and does
not
contain
systematic
security
vulnerabilities.” However, security always
comes at some costs and thus reduces the
performance of the additional connection.
The Testbed determined the appropriate
OPC UA security level and provided a
performance benchmark. One of the
findings was that TCP/IP communication
using OPC UA performs in the same range as
other protocols with similar security