IT meets OT: Technical and Regulatory Security for Industry 4.0 Machine Interfaces

New interdisciplinary research project at IBE (HT), IMVS (HT), and IWI (HSW).In the context of Industry 4.0, increasingly autonomous, intelligent, and non-hierarchical machine and system systems are being deployed in production and logistics. These systems are interconnected through a so-called integration platform (also IoT platform) and share a common data environment. This results in a fusion of Information Technologies (IT) with Operational Technologies (OT).For the integration of machines and systems, new Industry 4.0 communication standards and interfaces such as OPC UA (Open Platform Communication Unified Architecture) or the UMATI standard are used. Machine manufacturers and integrators face the challenge: How do they ‹validate› the security of data interfaces?Although the utilized interfaces and protocols offer configurable security features such as various encryptions or authentication features, in practice, they are usually only enabled or configured without sustainable consideration of their meaningfulness in terms of technical measures for data security or regulatory requirements.