Inter-Technology Bridging Gateway: A Low Cost Legacy Adaptation Approach to Secure Industrial Systems

Abstract

A major hindrance in industry modernization is the interoperability issues between existing legacy and new systems. Legacy systems normally have security vulnerabilities and are cost prohibitive to upgrade/replace. Thus, a feasible solution is needed to equip legacy systems with secure emerging technologies. This paper presents a low-cost ARM processor based Inter-Technology Bridging Gateway (ITBG). Its modular design makes it easily customizable for any industrial application. As a use case, this paper presents design, implementation, compliance testing and validation of ITBG for synchrophasor technology in smart grid. It bridges technological gap between legacy and new phasor devices by supporting two-way protocol translation between IEEE C37.118.2 and IEC 61850-90-5 standards. Further, it ensures system security by using IEC recommended GDOI security mechanism. Experiments in a laboratory based physical testbed successfully validated ITBG for different time-critical synchrophasor applications.

A Seamless Cloud Migration Approach to Secure Distributed Legacy Industrial SCADA Systems

“…Over the last few years, several cybersecurity incidents have been reported on critical industrial operations such as Stuxnet and the Ukraine blackout [4], [5]. The presence of legacy systems is normally considered as the root cause for such security incidents [6]. Similarly, legacy devices in power systems have weak or no security as identified in [3], [7].…”

“…Its adoption is hindered due to interoperability issues with the existing legacy IEEE C37.118 compliant devices. Due to cost and deployment complexity involved, it is usually not a feasible option to replace legacy phasor devices [6].…”

A Secure Cloud Migration, Monitoring and Analytics Framework for Industrial Internet of Things

“…Several cyber-security incidents have been reported in the last few years on critical national infrastructures such as the Ukraine blackout and Stuxnet [3], [4]. The root cause for most cyber-security incidents is the presence of legacy equipment with weak security [1], [5], [6].…”

A Robust Wide-Area Measurement-Based Damping Controller for Networks With Embedded Multiterminal and Multiinfeed HVDC Links

“…To bridge the technological gap between latest and legacy devices, authors in [8] proposed a protocol translation gateway. The gateway is attached to the industrial end-point that converts the legacy protocol into a secure modern protocol.…”

“…In general, the current research trend focuses on the development of secure protocols for new devices [7] and protocol translation proxies [8], [9] for legacy devices to address the communication security issues. These existing solutions normally use a single encryption key for each session or utilize the same key for all group members in the group key management framework [8]. This can put the entire system security at stake if an encryption key is compromised.…”