Automation and IT both needed to guarantee security
Leading representatives of German industry represented the ‘Security in Automation’ steering committee during an exclusive round table talk at the premises of the German TV station ZDF in Berlin.
The committee is a panel of leading industrial associations; companies taking part included BMW, Bayer and Nestle from the consumer goods industry, Nortel (IT service provider), Lenze and Siemens from automation industries, and Victoria, an insurance company. Mr. Kräußlich, editor of ‘Publish Industry Verlag’, led the discussions. The German Profibus organisation PNO was also part of the committee.
All participants agreed that Ethernet in the production arena will require additional measures to guarantee IT security, covering both the automation and the IT level, as the management level of the enterprise is now functionally linked with the automation level.
Measures related to production staff are also of importance, because lack of knowledge amongst personnel is often the cause for security-related failures. This means that both technical and organizational measures need to be defined and communicated to everyone in a manufacturing enterprise in the form of strict company policies that are rigidly policed.
Since the beginning of the development of PROFINET, PI has considered the topic of security to be critical and has already published a document called the ‘PROFINET Security Guideline’ – to help.
The PROFINET security concept described in this document meets the requirements of network security for Ethernet-based automation systems in manufacturing. The concept fulfils the demands for access control, data encryption, authentication and the logging of security relevant events.