An invisibility cloak

Digitalization promises greater productivity, efficiency and operational safety through connectivity between process engineering systems. Important components of industrial digitalization include field devices for measurement, control and regulation that are connected to the internet via technologies such as Bluetooth gateways. This connectivity has its price though, because it offers an attack surface to hackers and cybercriminals. If field instruments are tampered with, there is risk of a production standstill – or even plant damage and endangerment of people nearby.

Cryptologists have developed asymmetric methods to avoid such situations. Rather than relying on just a single encryption key, these methods work with a pair of keys, one public and one private. Stored in digital certificates, these two keys must engage with one another before data can be exchanged. Yet when there are numerous small communication partners, which is often the case in industrial environments, this process soon becomes highly complex, requires extensive computing power and results in correspondingly high power consumption.

Password-based protection systems are user-friendly in comparison, but are very prone to hacking with offline cyberattacks. Here, hackers first steal password-related information, for example by intercepting encrypted data during a login sequence. They then try out different passwords offline on their local computer until they find the correct one. The only way to prevent an attack like this from succeeding is by using sufficiently long encryption keys.