Industry 4.0 (IIoT): The Advent of Cryptography

Digitalization in industry (Industry 4.0, IIoT) is rapidly increasing the number of connected physical devices and systems on the Internet, and experts predict that the total number of connected sensors and devices will rise to more than 50 billion by 2022. Although this opens up interesting possibilities, it also raises major concerns. Major concerns because questions about privacy, the integrity of data or its origin cannot be answered or cannot be answered adequately.

However, there are also industrial sectors that are absolutely dependent on unadulterated data and have therefore been systematically tackling the issue of data protection/data security for some time. In addition to the automotive industry (see autonomous driving), rail transport has also been dealing with the networking of components for some time and the Swiss railroad companies (SBB, BLS, SOB, RhB and VöV), for example, are preparing for the digital future with the smartrail 4.0 program.

The new technologies and the strong networking of components are intended to further increase capacity and safety in rail traffic. In addition, the annual costs of rail operations are to be significantly reduced through automation and optimization.

However, the strong networking of devices and systems increasingly requires secure and reliable authentication and authorization. In addition, depending on the use case, the integrity and encryption of data as well as non-repudiation are mandatory. To meet these security requirements, a modern and stable public key infrastructure (PKI) is the basic prerequisite and thus creates the basis for digital signatures, encryption and much more. Various analyses have shown that a classic PKI, such as a corporate PKI for user and client certificates, is no longer sufficient and existing architectures need to be rethought.

New PKI environments must be based on secure and robust infrastructures and must also be scalable, expandable and reducible. High-performance PKIs must be able to create, distribute and validate several thousand certificates per second, depending on the application. Furthermore, PKIs must offer modern interfaces so that processes relating to certificates can be handled as quickly and automatically as possible.

TEMET AG specializes in developing PKI strategies, designing new and modern PKI environments and can support you in their implementation.

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)

About the author

About the author

André Clerc is a recognized PKI expert with over 20 years of experience in consulting and training companies. He provides comprehensive support to customers from all industries in the areas of PKI, IoT, identification, authentication and authorization solutions, security architectures and system hardening.

André Clerc, Managing Security Consultant