Digital technologies have firmly penetrated the manufacturing sector, successfully and at an ever-increasing rate, passing the initial stages of business transformation.

Digital Transformation in Manufacturing

Digital transformation of production means revolutionary changes in business models. The digital transformation in manufacturing involves the introduction of modern innovative technologies and products, the adaptation and development of new business models to the conditions of the digital economy and, due to this, the creation of smart factories and a qualitative improvement in business processes, including the production process.

The changes in the modern world caused by the booming growth with information technology and universal digitalization could not but affect production systems. The invention and widespread use of programmable controllers, robots, and digital control systems integrated with enterprise corporate networks has led to a change in approaches to production management and the rapid development of several new technological departments. It has also placed more emphasis on ensuring the safety of industrial systems.

The evolution of technology and management tools towards the widespread use of computerized components has led to the emergence and rapid growth in the number of new attacks on industrial systems. A modern attacker uses targeted attacks on digital production facilities, specialized arsenals of means of influence; not only technical means but, for example, social engineering.

Cybersecurity of Smart Manufacturing

Without exaggeration, digital transformation is the mainstream of the technological development of the industry. Modern smart manufacturing uses digital and computer technology in all aspects of its work. Almost all processes, from direct control and process control to business planning and workflow, are currently carried out using digital data and digital infrastructure. This raises the need for more security of all technological processes.

Cybersecurity is a set of principles and means of ensuring the security of information processes, approaches to managing security and other technologies that are used to actively counter the implementation of cyber threats.

The modern security paradigm includes:

  1. Revision of access control models that take into account openness, flexibility and distribution. Models should be based on temporal logic.
  2. Adoption of virtualization technology as a powerful means of protection, which allows moving from the concept of a “protected system” (from a fixed set of threats) to the concept of “a system with predictable behavior”.
  3. The implementation of the principle of separation of the information processing environment and the means of protection.
  4. Building the theoretical foundations of managing dynamic protection (adapting to current threats) as an object of automatic regulation with the concept of a stability zone, aftereffect (inertia) of dynamic characteristics
  5. Acceptance of the openness of systems (Internet connection) as an inalienable property and the construction of protection with this in mind
  6. Development of the basics of assessing elasticity (system adaptability) and scalability.
  7. Development of new principles for detecting attacks, viruses, rootkits, worms, RPS and other malware.
  8. Taking into account the possibility of using supercomputers to create new attack scenarios, scanning systems, intervention in production management, cryptanalysis.

Industry 4.0 and Technology Areas

The basis for digital transformation is computer technology and digital measuring instruments. Computer technologies in smart manufacturing have gone from isolated “islands” of control systems and office computers to multilevel geographically distributed corporate networks with access control and information security. Due to the development of cloud technologies and data centers, the problem of a limited amount of stored data and computing power is removed.

This enables the large-scale digital transformation of manufacturing industry, which is often referred to in the literature as the fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0. Industry 4.0 technologies include at least:

  • smart manufacturing devices and the industrial Internet of things – the ability to obtain comprehensive data about an object or equipment with their transfer to any other system, usually over wireless networks;
  • a digital copy (digital double) – a full description of the object at all stages of the life cycle, including drawings and three-dimensional models in digital form, a model of the process, data on the current process parameters and other important parameters;
  • Big data – technologies for working with large volumes of heterogeneous data (time series, events, etc.) in order to analyze and obtain significant information for decision making;
  • machine learning and artificial intelligence – a range of technologies for teaching computer systems in order to find dependencies and apply them to decision making;
  • cloud technologies and services that allow you to store and process data, perform software services on the infrastructure of the “cloud” located on the Internet or in the corporate data center;
  • wireless and mobile communications technologies, mobile devices, and applications;
  • Robotics
  • virtual and augmented reality;
  • additive manufacturing and 3D printing, etc.

Digital transformation allows us to ensure significant growth in market volumes, increases the competitiveness of enterprise products and solves at a new level the continuously complicated tasks of industrial enterprises. It is vital not to let security threats compromise a significant potential of smart manufacturing.