https://www.mdu.se/

Industrial automation and control systems are responsible for running our most important infrastructures, providing electricity and clean water, producing medicine and food, along with many other services and products we take for granted. The safe and secure operation of these systems is therefore of great importance. Reliability is a fundamental requirement, with spatial controller redundancy being one important fault-tolerance mechanism. In current control system solutions, controller redundancy is implemented using state and heartbeat transfer communicated over dedicated physical links, based on an assumption of implicit trust. However, with the emerging network-centric control strategies there is a desire to transition into dynamic redundancy scenarios, where such dedicated links are unfeasible. In this paper, an approach for a threat-model based security analysis is presented from the perspective of the automation industry. The approach is applied to the communication links used for supporting control system redundancy within a network-centric architecture.