Ensuring Trustworthy Industrial Systems

As in real life, trust is a precious commodity in today’s digital realm. With our lives becoming ever more closely interconnected in an intricate web of different actors, systems, organizations, and devices, it is essential that we know who to trust and, indeed, how to trust. At Wibu-Systems, years of work on protecting and securing the technological backbone of modern industry, from industrial controllers and embedded systems to the intellectual property being shared in distributed manufacturing arrangements, we know only too well that this applies even more urgently in the industrial internet. With companies’ business models and economic fortunes, invaluable know-how, and human lives depending on systems that run reliably, we need a new framework that clearly defines trustworthiness.

This is the challenge that the Industry IoT Consortium has set out to master. As one of the premier forces behind the rise of the Industrial Internet of Things, the IIC has dedicated its brain pool of affiliated engineers, practitioners, and theorists to draft the IIoT Trustworthiness Framework Foundations, published on 15 July 2021. This fundamental document is the product of five years of work, distilling the essence of trustworthiness for the purposes of the IIoT in the form of five factors – safety, security, privacy, reliability, and resilience. Systems need to operate as expected even in a connected industrial realm that is often fraught with risks and threats, from within and without, caused intentionally or inadvertently, by human actors or by the simple vagaries of complex technology.

To accompany the launch of its IIoT Trustworthiness Framework, the IIC has assembled a crack team of top security experts and the co-chairs of the IIC Trustworthiness Task Group, including our very own Marcellus Buchheit, co-founder of Wibu-Systems, Frederick Hirsch from OASIS, Robert Martin from the MITRE Corporation, and Mitch Tseng from Tseng InfoServ for a special webinar:

Join the proceedings and follow the speakers as they engage in a live discussion on the problems facing modern connected industry, the urgency of the situation, and the potential and opportunity created by the proposed solution: A shared understanding of how systems should be organized and operate with each other in order for us to entrust them with the critical infrastructure running our cities, the systems keeping vital supply chains functioning, the software operating potentially life-saving medical devices, or the lines of communication through which some of our most private information is being shared on a regular basis. The IIC Trustworthiness Task Group believes: The stakes could not be higher, so knowing which systems we can trust should not be left to guesswork.