Secure Interconnection of IT-OT Networks in Industry 4.0

Increasingly, the society is witnessing how today’s industry is adapting the new technologies and communication protocols to offer more optimal and reliable services to end-users, with support for inter-domain communication belonging to diverse critical infrastructures. As a consequence of this technological revolution, interconnection mechanisms are required to offer transparency in the connections and protection in the different application domains, without this implying a significant degradation of the control requirements. Therefore, this book chapter presents a reference architecture for the new Industry 4.0 where the interconnection core is mainly concentrated in the Policy Decision Points (PDP), which can be deployed in high volume data processing and storage technologies such as cloud and fog servers. Each PDP authorizes actions in the field/plant according to a set of factors (entities, context and risks) computed through the existing access control measures, such as RBAC+ABAC+Risk-BAC (Role/Attribute/Risk-Based Access Control, respectively), to establish coordinated and constrained accesses in extreme situations. Part of these actions also includes proactive risk assessment measures to respond to anomalies or intrusive threats in time.