Charlie and the CryptoFactory: Towards Secure and Trusted Manufacturing Environments

The modernization that stems from Industry 4.0 started populating the manufacturing sector with networked devices, complex sensors, and a significant proportion of physical actuation components. However, new capabilities in networked cyber-physical systems demand more complex infrastructure and algorithms and often lead to new security flaws and operational risks that increase the attack surface area exponentially. The interconnected nature of Industry 4.0-driven operations and the pace of digital transformation mean that cyberattacks can have far more extensive effects than ever before. Based on that, the core ideas of this paper are driven by the observation that cybersecurity is one of the key enablers of Industry 4.0. Having this in mind, we propose CryptoFactory - a forward-looking design of a layered-based architecture that can be used as a starting point for building secure and privacy-preserving smart factories. CryptoFactory aims to change the security outlook in smart manufacturing by discussing a set of fundamental requirements and functionality that modern factories should support in order to be resistant to both internal and external attacks. To this end, CryptoFactory first focuses on how to build trust relationships between the hardware devices in the factory. Then, we look on how to use several cryptographic approaches to allow IoT devices to securely collect, store and share their data while we also touch upon the emerging topic of secure and privacy-preserving communication and collaboration between manufacturing environments and value chains. Finally, we look into the problem of how to perform privacy-preserving analytics by leveraging Trusted Execution Environments and the promising concept of Functional Encryption.