Digitalization over the entire product lifecycle accelerates the development, validation, instrumentation and deployment of complex industrial products while increasing product quality but also leads to new safety & security related requirements in the design, testing, production and operation of these systems.

Realising in a cost-effective way, the full potential of trustworthy and secure cyber-physical systems and applications in Automated Driving and Industry 4.0, requires a holistic approach that combines operational aspects as well as  technology. The objective is to integrate security levels across all dimensions. IoT4CPS developed guidelines, methods and tools to enable safe and secure IoT-based applications for automated driving and for smart production in Industry 4.0. The project addressed safety and security aspects in a holistic approach both along the specific value chains and the product life cycles. IoT4CPS addressed the entire technology stack from semi-conductors (sub-component level), via control systems (component level), to applications (system level).

Within this project DUK developed a watermarked-based security architecture and implemented a proof-of-concept implementation of watermark-based security measures on a LORA platform demonstrating the applicability for protecting highly distributed industrial application with extremely low-power and low-bandwidth wireless connectivity

For industrial data a special focus lies on the authentication and data provenance of data delivered from field level (sensor) networks. These data and the respective networks are characterized by small data volume and strong constraints in terms of available bandwidth and computational resources and might also have the necessity of data aggregation and sensor data fusion. Conventional cryptography might suffer from limited computational resources in field devices and from limited bandwidth, packet size and resulting energy constraint in wireless networks. Watermarks are an alternative lightweight security measure ensuring authenticity and data ownership. In particular, no additional data volume as required by message authentication codes or digital signatures are added in limited channels.

The advantage of using watermarks is that it is integrated in the data, i.e., 1) it does not require additional storage, bandwidth or resources,  2) it is inherently attached to the data and 3) the watermark is (to a certain extent) preserved during legitimate operation. Nevertheless, when using watermarks with non-media data invisibility, robustness and capacity have to be reconsidered due to the different type of data. The architecture developed by DUK provides concepts to authenticate data streams, encode data provenance in the stream and protect message integrity.

We also demonstrated this security measure by embedding digital watermarks in LoRaWAN based sensor systems. Within the presented approach, the transmitted messages themselves do not need to be modified. Rather, the inter-packet interval
between individual packets is used as a side-channel to carry the security-relevant information.

By enriching data with hidden watermarks the level of trustworthiness has been successfully increased.

Details

Duration 01/12/2017 - 31/12/2020
Funding FFG
Program IKT der Zukunft
Department

Department for Integrated Sensor Systems

Center for Distributed Systems and Sensor Networks

Principle investigator for the project (University for Continuing Education Krems) Dipl.-Ing. Albert Treytl
Project members

Publications

Sauter,, T.; Vasques, F. (2020). ETFA 2020: The First Hybrid IES Conference in Challenging Times [Society News]. IEEE Industrial Electronics Magazine, Vol. 14, no. 4: 171-173

Bigler, T.; Treytl, A.; Sauter, T. (2020). Side-Channel Watermarking for LoRaWAN Using Robust Inter-Packet Timing. In: IEEE, Proceedings for the IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA): 10.1109/ETFA46521.2020.9211875, IEEE, Wien

Lectures

Side-Channel Watermarking for LoRaWAN Using Robust Inter-Packet Timing

IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA) 2020, 10/09/2020

5G for Industrial Automation

5th International B2B Software Days, Wien, Österreich, 15/03/2019

Team

Consortium

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