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IIoT and cyber-resilience

Could blockchain have thwarted the Stuxnet attack?

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Abstract

Contemporary business (including those with integrated AI capabilities) often encompasses or aspires towards the automated, networked production of industrial goods across transnational supply chains that have many digitalized interfaces. This allows competitive operations in time, costs, and quality, which have been widely discussed. On the downside, it entails cyber threats with significant risks for society in areas including business, environment, and health. Hence, to adequately manage these risks in the emerging digital world, there is a vital necessity to raise awareness, establish, maintain, and further develop cyber-security measures to ensure an appropriate level of protection along the entire value chain and supply chain. Blockchain capabilities are introduced to improve the technical and organizational basis for secured operations in industrial networks. Its advantages are explained by a simple USB-device use case, that has often been the root cause to subsequent security incidents, especially in the Stuxnet incident.

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Notes

  1. Technically, this is achieved by writing each entry into a block linked to the previous block containing a link to all previously written entries. Hence the name blockchain.

  2. Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) empower the realization of a hardware identifier. Due to the unique physical properties of the hardware implementation, PUFs are unclonable. The replication of a PUF would require replication of the hardware material at a level of granularity that is currently considered to be technically infeasible.

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Acknowledgements

The first author’s work is supported by the EU H2020 project FENTEC (Grant no. 780108). The authors would also like to thank the management of Carlton & United Breweries for permission to publish this work.

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Correspondence to Michael Lees.

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Gajek, S., Lees, M. & Jansen, C. IIoT and cyber-resilience. AI & Soc 36, 725–735 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01023-w

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01023-w

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