Industrial Internet Security Framework v 1.0 | Page 121

Security Framework

12: Looking Ahead—The Future of the IIoT

12 LOOKING AHEAD—THE FUTURE OF THE IIOT
This document outlined best practices and considerations needed to address security risks
associated with the Industrial Internet of Things. An overview of the differences between IIoT
systems and traditional information technology systems was presented, as was the importance
of considering key system characteristics and their relationship to risks, security assessments and
risk analysis. The Functional and Implementation Viewpoints, described technologies and
practices that affect the security and privacy of IIoT systems. This chapter provides an overview
of the security implications that new technologies and trends may have on the future of the IIoT.
The industrial internet shows great promise for vastly increasing the capabilities of the devices in
a variety of applications, including factory automation, medical systems and a wide variety of
other systems. By connecting devices to enable communication among each other and the cloud,
it opens the possibilities of making the devices “intelligent”, potentially delivering unprecedented
capabilities.
Advances in technology will enable a new generation of devices that are more intelligent and
have greater efficiency than their predecessors. This should lead to an inflection point where the
promise of greater functionality, efficiency and intelligence will lead to more rapid updates of
brownfield systems or perhaps even a wholesale set of greenfield upgrades. In OT, where system
lifespans have historically been measured in decades, such inflection points are few and far
between. As these high-value industrial systems are increasingly connected, it is even more
critical that security and privacy risks be addressed.
Broad forces such as increasingly powerful microcontrollers, microelectromechanical system
(MEMS) sensors, battery-friendly wireless protocols, horizontally scalable computing
infrastructures, high-assurance microkernels, additive manufacturing, desktop milling, venture
funding and crowd funding will likely continue to disrupt industries in unpredictable ways. New
wireless protocols stream richer sensor data and new microcontrollers may be energy friendly
enough to work strictly via energy harvesting, opening untold possibilities for instrumenting
discrete manufacturing, refineries and countless production and treatment plants.
Of course, these revolutions in the core of industrial systems are not happening in isolation.
Similar advances in sensing, instrumentation and automation of building controls are driving
growth of smart building and smart cities. At the same time, falling costs of bandwidth and
embedded processing are making it easier and easier to manage supply chains spanning tiers of
suppliers scattered across multiple continents, including such exciting use cases as mass
customization through just-in-time manufacturing of pipelined single-piece workflow. Traditional
management models and operational architectures often don’t scale for such uses.
Traditional operational architectures revolve around a centralized management and monitoring
capability to ensure proper functionality. This is analogous to the human brain and the series of
nerves that allow the brain to push commands to muscles (actuators) and receive information
(from sensors). Increasingly, though, in industrial settings, we have the opportunity to leverage
tremendous distributed computing power for intelligence at the edge of the network.
IIC:PUB:G4:V1.0:PB:20160926

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