Security Aspects of Safety Networks

The importance of safe communications in industrial environments has been steadily increasing over the past years and several special-purpose solutions have been developed to this purpose. However, the prevalent trend nowadays is the adoption of standard transmission technologies to support both safe and non-safe data exchanges over the same medium. This exposes safety-aware protocols to the same security threats experienced in conventional communication networks. This paper deals with some security aspects of a popular safety-oriented communication solution, namely Safety-NET p. Its main contribution is showing that safety protocols too suffer from security threats and can even make things simpler in carrying out certain types of attacks such as denial of service (DoS).