WIRELESS CYBERSECURITY IN AN INDUSTRIAL CONTEXT PART 2
Glenn Johnson, Editor
Wireless networks have been creeping into process plants, factories and utilities for some time now — the convenience and efficiencies they provide being obvious, but the cybersecurity risks must be managed well.
T
he risk with WLAN deployments is that they effectively create additional potential points of ingress into plant networks. In Part 1 of this article we discussed how modern Wi-Fi access points provide a high level of data encryption that makes eavesdropping on data difficult if not impossible for most hackers. But this is not the whole story: there are also other types of flaws in many Wi-Fi access points that make it possible to insert rogue clients and access points. There are, of course, many advantages in deploying wireless technologies for greater efficiencies and improved functionality at lower cost. However, the deployment of such technologies can potentially open up a veritable ‘can of worms’ in relation to plant cybersecurity, so understanding the inherent risks and applying
18 WHAT'S NEW IN PROCESS TECHNOLOGY - MAY 2017
effective firewall and intrusion detection techniques are important to mitigate cybersecurity risks.
The problem of management frames The discussion in Part 1 about encryption and access control mainly applies to the issue of confidentiality — although once confidentiality is breached, it then makes more possible an attack on the availability and integrity of a system. However, there are other aspects of wireless network operation that are more directly related to the network’s availability and integrity. One of the aspects of wireless networks that is not normally transparent to those managing the network is how the network manages itself. While network management in a wired network is
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