Reasoning on Adopting OPC UA for an IoT-Enhanced Smart Energy System from a Security Perspective

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the security of OPC UA, a protocol for M2M communications, demonstrating its suitability for secure IoT-enabled smart energy systems compared to traditional protocols.

Contribution

It provides an analysis of OPC UA's security features and showcases its application in enhancing security within smart energy IoT systems.

Findings

OPC UA offers robust security features suitable for IoT environments.

It can be integrated with traditional protocols to improve system security.

The protocol effectively supports secure M2M communications in smart energy systems.

Abstract

Smart Services using Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications are on the rise, but still more often than not, traditional industrial protocols are used to interconnect the entities of the resulting systems. These protocols are mostly not intended for functioning in such a highly interconnected environment and, therefore, often lack even the most fundamental security measures. To address this issue, this paper reasons on the security of a communications protocol, intended for Machine to machine (M2M) communications, namely the Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA) and exemplifies, on a smart energy system, its capability to serve as a secure communications architecture by either itself or in conjunction with traditional protocols.