The term fieldbus was coined to refer to a family of industrial computer network protocols used for real-time distributed control.
The ecosystem of fieldbus-based protocols is going to remain in deployment for the foreseeable future. Industrial internet platforms and applications have to directly or indirectly interact with fieldbus protocols to acquire data or to communicate actuation signals. In an IIoT context, the security of these protocols becomes all the more important.
Most of the fieldbus protocols facilitate data exchange between field devices, PLCs, and so on. Some common characteristics of fieldbus technologies are as follows:
- Information security mechanisms are typically not built into fieldbus protocols. They are designed for highly controlled, air-gapped operational domains.
- These protocols are not supported by open standard communities.
- Originally developed by a given industrial connectivity vendor, the protocols were adopted in an ecosystem serving vertical...
