The Challenge
Evolving and interconnected Industrial Control Systems (ICS) play a key role in daily life. Automation of these systems represent opportunity for efficiency, cost and operational savings, but also present continuous and complex threats to their operation and infrastructure. Traditional “Air Gapped” solutions are difficult to maintain and are not adequate to provide the integration needed to support societal trends, Industry 4.0 promises of improved efficiency and lower cost, and public policy decisions based on a changing climate.
For Critical Infrastructure and Defense applications like an ICS, cybersecurity protections must have certified, high assurance protections to address these advanced threats. Most commercially available ICS equipment does not have adequate cybersecurity protections that many manufacturers claim to provide and are even more difficult to verify. Verifying cybersecurity claims are a long and expensive processes to obtain the required certifications. This inevitably delays the approval to deploy critical cybersecurity solutions.
Applications requiring remote connectivity between ICS devices are common. For example, a solar array controller may request information from a remote weather station to optimize energy production. The weather station may be in a remote location and require a secure communications link to ensure false weather data is not used by the solar array controller. To provide the communications link, it may not be practical to use wired, traditional short-range ICS wireless transports (e.g., Zigbee, IEEE 802.15.4), or proprietary radio networks for transport due to availability, cost, and/or time to deploy. With modern Internet of Things specific cellular protocols available from multiple cellular providers, these cellular systems can be used for ICS applications. These services will continue to improve during the transition to 5G and beyond, however, the security of the transport providers cannot be readily guaranteed.
Secmation's Industrial Control Systems Solution
Secmation provides security equipment and technologies designed from the ground up to protect industrial control systems in high security applications. These solutions incorporate encryption while including advanced security features for an Intrusion Detection and Prevention System that supports standard ICS protocols and provides centralized remote security management. Our technologies support both wired and wireless communications standards including cellular.
Secmation also provides FIPS 140-2 certified encryption required by many applications and data packages to support DoD Risk Management Framework (RMF) certifications of systems to enable more rapid deployment. We can also address the majority of technical NIST 800-53 security requirements applicable to ICS deployments.
A key feature of all our solutions is flexibility and customization. These products and services are intentionally designed and developed to integrate with both new and legacy systems by requiring minimal change to existing designs. Secmation can provide the solutions as production equipment or as hardware/software components that can be incorporated into an OEM design along with integration/customization services.
Please Contact Us to learn more about our Industrial Control Systems suite of tools.
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