From October 10th to 13th, 2023, the third German-Korean research workshop between the two international sister projects PoQsiKom and IPSecICS, was held at the offices of Core Security in Seoul. The PoQsiKom project partners Fraunhofer AISEC, Siemens AG, and TRUMPF met with the IPSecICS project partners Korea University, Core Security, Dream Security, WAEM, and the Smart Manufacturing Research Association (SMRA).
Participants (Korea University, Dream Security, WAEM, SMRA, Siemens, TRUMPF, Fraunhofer AISEC, and Core Security) of the workshop at Core Security in Seoul.
During the four days workshop in Seoul, PoQsiKom and IPSecICS project partners presented the current project standings and discussed the national and joint research goals. The discussions also included a presentation of the PoQsiKom and IPSecICS demonstrators.
The PoQsiKom demonstrator shows the remote acknowledgement of safety equipment of a machine tool using a trustworthy connection to an off-site remote operation center. During the presentation, TRUMPF project partners remotely operated the demonstrator physically located at TRUMPF’s premises in Ditzingen, Germany from the meeting room in Seoul. The remote acknowledgement was performed using the PoQsiKom integrated security system that is attached to the demonstrator machine tool’s safety equipment and surveillance camera.
Live demo of the remote acknowledgement of safety equipment of a machine tool in Ditzingen (Germany) via the public Internet from the meeting room in Seoul (Korea).
In addition to securing the data connection to remotely operated machine tools, the systems themselves must be equipped with hardened software to withstand unauthorized tampering. The IPSecICS demonstrator shows a security module that can be attached to the programming and debugging interface of a machine tool’s PLC to detect malicious control and configuration commands sent to the PLC. The security module filters commands according to pre-configured policies to prevent abnormal behavior of the machine tool.
During the discussions on the four meeting days, the PoQsiKom and IPSecICS project partners achieved an important breakthrough in combining the operator interfaces of both demonstrators to show the simultaneous operation, configuration (IPSecICS part) and acknowledgement (PoQsiKom part) of machine tools from an off-site location. The breakthrough led to the plan of presenting both demonstrators in a combined manner at the next Hannover Messe in 2024.