Successful Achievement of First Milestone

In summer 2022, the PoQsiKom consortium achieved the project’s first milestone: the end of the security system’s design phase.

In the system design phase, the project partners collaboratively detailed the project’s use case of a remote acknowledgement for a machine’s safety controller. In this use case, a camera attached to a secure and integrated system shall serve as eyes for a human operator acknowledging that the operating and processing area is safe for the (re)start of the machine. As the operator is located off-site, the data transferred between the operator and the machine’s camera and safety controller shall be secure and trustworthy.

The partners developed agile user stories to capture the challenges and requirements of secure remote monitoring and operations of a machine. The user stories provided the necessary background for partners to define a sophisticated attacker model for the use case, establish important design goals for remote acknowledgement of safety actions, and finally derive the design of integrated systems for the camera and safety controller.

Highlighting design goals for the security system, identified in this project phase, are as follows:

• Defense-in-depth: Critical operations must be transferred to inner layers, such as the machine’s camera or safety controller, instead of outer layer gateways.
• Zero trust: End-to-end trustworthy relationships between the remote operator and the machine’s camera and safety controller must be established.
• Crypto agility: System’s cryptographic algorithms must be updateable and interchangeable, possibly using the standardized Generic Trust Anchor API.
• Next-generation crypto: Integrated support for post-quantum algorithms must be readily available.

The final design of the integrated security systems, depicted using the example of the machine’s safety controller:

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