Distributed identity based private key generation for SCADA systems

Abstract

The security of the ICT (Information Communications Technology) components of industrial systems is gaining great importance in the context of their criticality for society at large. There is an urgent need for the consideration of security in their design, and for the analysis of the related vulnerabilities and potential threats. The high exposure of industrial critical infrastructure to such threats is mainly due to the intrinsic weakness of the communication protocols used to control the process network. The peculiarities of the industrial protocols (low computational power, large geographical distribution, near to real-time constraints) make hard the effective use of traditional cryptographic schemes and in particular the implementation of a effective key management infrastructure supporting a cryptographic layer. In this paper we present the first working prototype of a distributed key generation infrastructure for SCADA systems based on the well known identity based crypto-paradigm. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.