Synergistic Security for the Industrial Internet of Things: Integrating Redundancy, Diversity, and Hardening

Abstract

As the Industrial Internet of Things (IIot) becomes more prevalent in critical application domains, ensuring security and resilience in the face of cyber-attacks is becoming an issue of paramount importance. Cyber-attacks against critical infrastructures, for example, against smart water-distribution and transportation systems, pose serious threats to public health and safety. Owing to the severity of these threats, a variety of security techniques are available. However, no single technique can address the whole spectrum of cyber-attacks that may be launched by a determined and resourceful attacker. In light of this, we consider a multi-pronged approach for designing secure and resilient IIoT systems, which integrates redundancy, diversity, and hardening techniques. We introduce a framework for quantifying cyber-security risks and optimizing IIoT design by determining security investments in redundancy, diversity, and hardening. To demonstrate the applicability of our framework, we present two case studies in water distribution and transportation systems. Our numerical evaluation shows that integrating redundancy, diversity, and hardening can lead to reduced security risk at the same cost.

A Systematic Survey of Industrial Internet of Things Security: Requirements and Fog Computing Opportunities

“…Risk assessment for the IIoT is another field that has seen activity in recent years. In [44] and [126] two risk assessment models for the IIoT are presented. The first is mainly focused on water sewage systems, but has aspects that can be generalized, while the second aims to be general, and utilizes use cases as its input.…”

“…The implication that resilience requirements bring to the security domain are that security technologies should provide the capability to continue normal system operations if parts of the system are considered compromised. This could for example be done by rerouting tasks to other capable components, or through other means, often belonging to one of three canonical approaches identified by Laszka et al [126]: redundancy, diversity, and hardening.…”

Internet of Things Security Requirements, Threats, Attacks, and Countermeasures

“…The impacts of the resilience obligations on the security realm necessitate mechanisms that ought to deliver the ability to keep on regular system functions when portions of the system are deemed to malfunction. This might be accomplished by deflecting tasks to alternative efficient IoT elements, or via other methods, habitually belonging to one of three established approaches for improving the security and resilience of IoT-based systems, namely diversity, redundancy, and hardening [37].…”

Attack Trees for Security and Privacy in Social Virtual Reality Learning Environments

“…To build a trustworthy VRLE system architecture which ensures security and privacy, integration of design principles in the life cycle of edge computing interconnected and distributed IoT device based systems is essential [25]. We adapt the following three design principles from NIST SP800-160 [13], [25] such as: (i) Hardening -defined as reinforcement of individual or types of components to ensure that they are harder to compromise or impair, (ii) Diversity -defined as the implementation of a feature with diverse types of components to restrict the threat impact from proliferating further into the system, and (iii) Principle of least privilege -defined as limiting the privileges of any entity, that is just enough to perform its functions and prevents the effect of threat from propagating beyond the affected component.…”