Interoperability & Availability: Cybersecurity Foes or Allies?
New technology developments like artificial intelligence, robotics, automation, and virtual reality offer many profitable opportunities for the industrial sector. To leverage them, however, two things are required:
- High network availability
- Interoperability
Networks must provide and maintain an acceptable level of available service, even when disruption occurs, to make sure these technologies can function as expected.
Meanwhile, traditionally rigid, isolated security concepts must be broken down to create interfaces so systems can connect and communicate seamlessly.
In automotive manufacturing, for example, interoperability supports real-time communication between production, quality control, and supply chain management to improve operations and minimize bottlenecks.
In semiconductor manufacturing, ensuring interoperability between chip-design software, fabrication equipment, and testing tools can streamline production.
But mixing interoperability and high availability can also bring additional complexity that creates gateways for cyber attackers.
How Can Interoperability and High Availability Be Combined Securely?
First, let’s learn a little more about interoperability and high availability.
Interoperability Connects Critical Systems and Devices
Interoperability refers to connectivity between different systems, devices, and applications, as well as their ability to communicate and cooperate. This requires open interfaces, such as an API, for connecting systems and enabling data exchange.
The Benefits of Interoperability
Data exchange enabled by standards can offer several advantages:
- Access authorizations that determine which actions a user can perform and which resources they can access.
- Uniform syntactic understanding so systems can communicate through compatible formats and protocols.
- Uniform semantic understanding so systems can exchange and interpret information accurately and automatically through uniform data structure, coding, data transfer, exchange, and interpretation.
- Cross-system processes that standardize the non-technical aspects of an interoperable organization, such as guidelines, workflows, and standards of disparate systems.
Interoperable systems require fewer resources and less maintenance, ensuring consistency and comparability across devices and datasets. This can help establish better data quality, as well as more efficient data processing and usage.
Connectivity brings advantages for cybersecurity as well, because it means new security solutions can be implemented quickly and easily.
The Risks of Interoperability
Because interoperability can also make a system more vulnerable, data exchange results in higher requirements for data security and cybersecurity. Network managers must be aware of the corresponding interactions between systems.
Standards created to achieve interoperability should include and implement security standards. Organizational measures for clear cross-system processes, as mentioned above, can also contribute to security.
Interoperability brings lots of potential and functionality but increases complexity. This can make troubleshooting more difficult. If the complexity of a system increases, it becomes more difficult to guarantee high availability.
High Availability Ensures Uninterrupted Connectivity
High availability describes the reliability of a system or installation and the ability to function continuously over a certain period of time. The goal is usually to achieve five-nines availability, which means that the system is available 99.999% of the time.
Within industrial environments, there are different metrics to measure availability:
- Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF): expected timespan between two system failures
- Mean Downtime (MDT): average downtime of the system
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO): time required for repair or recovery after unplanned system failure
Before deployment, a high-availability system is extensively tested; backups and failover solutions are set up. To ensure high system availability, a single-point-of-failure principle is usually followed. This means that, if a failure occurs, then it can be attributed to a single component. Strictly speaking, this principle cannot be implemented by connecting different systems and interfaces.
The detectability of failures must be ensured with the aim of high availability. In the best-case scenario, there are systems and mechanisms that take effect automatically if a component fails so that operations can continue seamlessly.
This can be achieved, for example, by installing redundancies that enable a crossover to another component that continues the same process. This must not result in a loss of performance or data. In terms of efficiency, duplicate structures may seem counterproductive, but they are a necessary safeguard for system availability.
The Benefits of High Availability
A highly available network offers several important benefits for mission-critical operations.
Availability means less downtime. When your network and the critical systems connected to it remain operational, even during network failures, production and revenues don’t suffer.
Because you can rely on your network and systems, reliable communication between them is also possible. This enables seamless interaction among devices, sensors, and control systems to improve operations and optimize resource allocation.
The Risks of High Availability
Networks with high availability typically have more endpoints connected to them. This widens the attack surface and gives cyber attackers more possible entry points to work with.
If these networks are also complex, then there may be security gaps or misconfigurations that can create even more vulnerabilities.
Balancing High Availability and Interoperability
The Network Access Control (NAC) solution from macmon, a Belden brand, can strengthen availability in IT and OT networks. macmon NAC Scalability offers highly available NAC scenarios to protect systems that place high demands on network security and availability. The NAC solution gives you an overview of all accesses, connected systems, and network components so failures and threats can be quickly identified. Data traffic and connectivity are visible in the NAC solution.
macmon NAC is a powerful tool to implement clear roles, set appropriate access authorizations, and manage security standards and compliance.
macmon NAC also has a REST API and can connect easily to existing systems or new solutions. Numerous partnerships with other security technology providers enable data sharing, new functions, and value-added processes for even better cybersecurity.
macmon NAC can be part of your security concept to map interoperability under the safest possible circumstances, while ensuring high availability at the same time.