Chapter 7. Secure Processes and Governance

"Security gets orders of magnitude more attention today than only a short time ago."                                                                                       – Stan Schneider, CEO, RTI

IIoT attributes intelligence and autonomy to machines. In a world where smart machines make autonomous decisions, trustworthiness is critical and must be ingrained in their DNA. This distributed autonomy calls for a decentralized approach to IIoT security, where safety and integrity controls are built into every node, endpoint, and in every technology that renders intelligence and connectivity.

In this book, IIoT security is decomposed into endpoint, access, connectivity, and edge-cloud layers. Earlier chapters have already analyzed the security controls at each layer, where readers can find actionable tools to evaluate and implement security in the respective layers. However, the question that still remains unanswered is: how do we orchestrate multi-layered...

Challenges of unified security governance

Chapter 2, Industrial IoT Dataflow and Security Architecture, elaborates on how IIoT security involves much more than just the protection of information assets. Securing IIoT translates to establishing end-to-end trustworthiness. In addition to information security, trustworthiness relies on resilience, safety, reliability, and privacy. IIoT security governance policies must be designed to ensure adequate trustworthiness, by converging IT security understanding and domain-specific OT expertise.

For the industrial internet or the Industrie 4.0 ecosystems, how-much-ever we may hope for overarching, industry-wide security governance; in reality, such a unified model is not viable for various reasons. Some of that reasoning is presented here.

Security, in general, comes at a cost. It involves training a workforce and investing extra resources and cycles to implement security. This, in turn, impacts time-to-market. In a fast-paced innovation landscape ...

Securing processes across the IIoT life cycle

In a fast-paced software-defined economy, innovation and time-to-market often take precedence over security and reliability. The latter are either added after the fact or left to users to integrate. This, however, would not suffice in the case of regulated, mission-critical industry segments. For industrial products, safety and reliability controls must be ingrained at every phase of development and must satisfy rigorous standards and regulatory compliance.

The same holds true for IIoT. For IIoT systems, trustworthiness is not something we can "bolt on" post-deployment. Every phase of the solution life cycle needs to comply with the minimum safety, resilience, and security requirements. This section analyzes various strategies to achieve this. Figure 7.1 shows the various phases and processes of a typical IIoT solution. While standards are yet to evolve to evaluate the security of these processes and policies, this section presents some practical...

Understanding security roles

A sustainable IIoT security implementation depends on the well-orchestrated efforts of various ecosystem partners and stakeholders. The preceding section of this chapter (Securing processes across the IIoT life cycle) discussed actionable steps to integrate security across IIoT life cycle processes. These processes are also linked to multiple roles; each role is associated with its respective security onus. Effective security governance depends on role-based accountability. This section dissects and evaluates security responsibilities based on four broad role categories. Figure 7.3 illustrates these broad roles as four pillars (Author's note: the diagram only presents the roles, not necessarily the relational connections between these roles):

Figure 7.3: IIoT security responsibilities based on broad roles

Solution provider

Solution provider in Figure 7.3 is a generalized category representing providers of IIoT endpoint technologies, crypto solutions, software applications...

Elements of an IIoT security program

The security posture of an IIoT deployment depends on how safely it can weather instabilities during the operation phase. In spite of multiple layers of security checkpoints in the pre-operation phases, vulnerabilities do exist at runtime. In enterprise IT deployments, a security program provides well-orchestrated governance, protecting organizational assets and infrastructure from external and internal threats during the operational phase. Data availability, privacy, and integrity are the primary goals of an enterprise IT security program.

As we have already discussed in this book, the stakes in an IIoT deployment are much higher than enterprise IT. IIoT involves critical infrastructures and human safety. In addition to data availability, privacy, and integrity, an IIoT security program must ensure resilience and reliability in the event of an attack, which can be from external or internal adversaries, or due to inadvertent misconfigurations or natural...

Security maturity model

The various connected assets in an organization do not require the same level of security measures. For example, security measures for critical infrastructure and those for a handheld mobile device need not be of the same degree. Every organization needs to balance what is ideally desirable with what's practical and actionable in terms of resources. To guide you in the process, the IIC has defined the IoT Security Maturity Model (IIC-SMM), a conceptual framework to organize various considerations to determine the maturity level of a given system. 

The security maturity model can be used to identify the comprehensiveness and alignment necessary for different maturity levels appropriate for a specific industry. The framework can also be applied in the context of a specific organization, or a production environment, or at a specific system level to define what the current state of security is and the security target state. The following is an excerpt from IIC's "IoT Security...

Implementing an IIoT security program

A vital aspect of IIoT security governance is implementing a security program that is practical and actionable. In a constantly evolving threat landscape, it is a challenge for industrial adopters of IIoT to decide where and how to invest their limited security resources. Defining a security program by considering models such as SMM and C2M2 (USE-C2M2) can help organizations to right-size security mechanisms and investments.

The IIoT security program decides the resilience and reliability of the production environment, which directly impacts business goals, reputation, and the financial fate of an organization. That's why an organization's business-level stakeholders should directly engage and approve the security program. Many organizations may already have an IT security program, which is typically governed by the enterprise IT team. An IIoT security program involves both IT and OT environments and should either align with or build on top of existing...

Summary

This chapter presented an actionable roadmap to implement the multi-layered IIoT security model. Readers are now able to utilize practical insights on securing IIoT life cycle processes, security roles and responsibilities, the various elements of an IIoT security governance program, and how an organization can implement a practical and adaptive security governance program. The necessity of right-sizing security by setting the IIoT security objectives in the context of safety and reliability, an introduction to the security maturity model, and an evaluation of security roles were also discussed in this chapter.

In Chapter 8, IIoT Security Using Emerging Technologies, a few promising technologies that are still in the early phases of development are presented to help readers gain a basic understanding of their relevance and applicability.