Cybersecurity and Resilience Modelling for Software-Defined Networks-Based Manufacturing Applications

In addition to productivity and quality output, for many years, manufacturing systems were also designed with reliability and safety requirements in mind. In the recent decade or so, that approach seems not to be adequate anymore. The current manufacturing global operations ask for more stringent requirements than ever before, which include privacy and security of transactions, among others. Manufacturing control is not new, but the use of cloud environments to integrate distributed manufacturing facilities and entirely control the production processes across those facilities is an active research area denoted in terms such as: virtual factory, cloud manufacturing, Industry 4.0, and more recently, software-defined networking-based manufacturing. Software-defined networking is a relatively new networking architecture that decouples the network data and control mechanisms and assigns the entire data control to a logically centralized control plane that can be software-programmed based on specific application needs. From the security point of view, this translates in the fact that anyone with access to the controllers that run the network control software could potentially control the entire network. This paper proposes an integrated modelling environment that addresses the manufacturing system assurance through cybersecurity and resilience mechanisms for software-defined networks-based (SDN-based) manufacturing applications. First, the paper presents the proposed combined cybersecurity-resilience ontology to be used in the requirements capture of the manufacturing network design stages. Then, the paper presents the framework for SDN-based cybersecurity-resilience mechanisms for manufacturing applications, and ends with a future research section concerning the proposed cybersecurity-resilience modelling environment.