OSADL Networking Day
Next-generation Open Source real-time communication for industry is the lead theme of this year's Networking Day, which underlines the strong emphasis the OSADL community wants to place on the Publish/Subscribe (Pub/Sub) extensions of the OPC UA protocol and their possible connection with Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN). The topic was already presented in 2016. Spurred on by the great interest in the topic, also resulting from the studies of the Shaper Group, and by the fact that the OPC UA technology alone did not fulfill the industrial requirements and the much needed Publish/Subscribe extensions were not available under a usable Open Source implementation at this juncture, a new community project has been introduced. Run by Fraunhofer IOSB in Karlsruhe, Germany, India-based system integrator Kalycito Infotech, and OSADL, the project is partially funded by OSADL member companies and aims at overcoming the mentioned limitations and developing an IEC62541-compliant software package with Pub/Sub-extension under the Mozilla 2.0 Open Source license. The Pub/Sub extensions will become vital in future IoT-driven ecosystems of low-power devices that cannot provide the resources for traditional connection-based communication and require the multicast technology of Pub/Sub.
Throughout the day, selected OSADL members will be contributing to this discussion. At 2 pm, Ruediger Kuegler, VP Sales and Security Expert of Wibu-Systems, will talk about “Products and services provided by OSADL members: Secure distribution and storage of private keys for OPC UA”. Over the last couple of years, we have teamed up with Unified Automation to strengthen the native protections of the OPC UA protocol. The generic storage of cryptographic keys and sensitive
configuration files, e.g. RSA private keys or trust lists, in the file system exposes them to theft and tampering, especially in a world of cyber-physical systems that are connected to open networks. Amongst several ways for compromising a system, attackers use vulnerabilities in operating systems to inject trojans and get file system access. Wibu-Systems’ CodeMeter Embedded has been integrated with Unified Automation’s ANSI C based OPC UA SDK without changing or complicating the user experience for the customer.