Employee Trust Based Industrial Device Deployment and Initial Key Establishment

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel device deployment framework for industrial settings that leverages employee trust to simplify key management and enhance security during device commissioning.

Contribution

The work proposes a unique trust-based deployment framework that reduces initial security setup complexity by integrating employee trust, supported by a proof-of-concept and security analysis.

Findings

Framework is feasible to implement in industrial environments.

Security analysis confirms the framework meets security objectives.

Reduces burden of initial key management for engineers.

Abstract

An efficient key management system is required to support cryptography. Most key management systems use either pre-installed shared keys or install initial security parameters using out-of-band channels. These methods create an additional burden for engineers who manage the devices in industrial plants. Hence, device deployment in industrial plants becomes a challenging task in order to achieve security. In this work, we present a device deployment framework that can support key management using the existing trust towards employees in a plant. This approach reduces the access to initial security parameters by employees, rather it helps to bind the trust of the employee with device commissioning. Thus, this approach presents a unique solution to the device deployment problem. Further, through a proof-of-concept implementation and security analysis using the AVISPA tool, we present that our framework is feasible to implement and satisfies our security objectives.