A systematic design approach to IOT security for legacy production machinery

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging topic of rapidly growing technical importance for the industry. The aim is to connect objects with unique identifiers and combine them with internet connectivity for data transfer. This advanced connectivity has significant potential in the workshop-level upgrade of existing legacy equipment to unlock new features and economic benefits especially for monitoring and control applications However, the introduction of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) brings new additional security and integrity risks for the industrial environment in the form of network, communication, software and hardware security risks. This thesis addresses such fundamental new risks at their root by introducing a novel approach for IoT-enabled monitoring of legacy production machinery, which consist of five stages, incorporating security by design features. The first two phases of this novel approach aim to analyse current monitoring practices and security and vulnerability issues related to the application domain. The proposed approach applies three more stages which make the domain-relevant analysis to become application specific. These include a detailed model of the application context on legacy production machinery monitoring, together with its interfaces and functionality, implementing threat mitigations combined with a new modular IoT DAQ unit mechanism, validated by functional tests against Denial of Service (DoS) and clone attacks. Thus, to be effective, the design approach is further developed with application-specific functionality. This research demonstrates an instance of this innovative riskaverse design thinking through introducing an IoT device design which is applicable to a wide set of industrial scenarios. A practical showcase example of a specific implementation of the generic IoT design is given through a concrete industrial application that upgrades existing legacy machine tool equipment. The reported work establishes a novel viewpoint for the understanding of IoT security risks and their consequent mitigation, opening a new space of riskaverse designs that can bring significant confidence in data, safety, and security of IoT-enabled industry.