Securing the IIoT data flow

In Chapter 4, we analyzed five different options to connect the edge to industrial data sources, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each. The five options that we analyzed were the following:

• The edge on a fieldbus
• The edge on OPC Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM)
• The edge on OPC Proxy
• The edge on OPC UA
• OPC UA on a controller

We have not yet considered the cybersecurity requirements and constraints for each of these options. In this section, we will understand how to secure them from a networking perspective, according to the standards of the ICS and the related best practices. As we outlined in the previous Common control-network-segregation architectures section, securing a CN is just one of the recommendations of the DiD strategy that can be used to mitigate the cyber risks of entire control system environments. There are other best practices and specific countermeasures to implement to create an aggregated...