Nowadays, the internal network communication of Industrial Control Systems (ICS) usually takes place in unencrypted form. This, however, seems to be bound to change in the future: as we write, encryption of network traffic is seriously being considered as a standard for future ICS. In this paper we take a critical look at the pro's and con's of traffic encryption in ICS. We come to the conclusion that encrypting this kind of network traffic may actually result in a reduction of the security and overall safety. As such, sensible versus nonsensible use of encryption needs to be carefully considered both in developing ICS standards and systems.
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