RILKOSAN

Motivation and objectives: Due to the increasing digital networking in business and society, digital infrastructures are becoming ever more complex and thus offer new targets for unintentional and deliberately induced disruptions (attacks or manipulation), which jeopardize the correct flow of economic and social processes. The creation of resilient and reliable communication systems is therefore an important overarching goal. The selected use case with social relevance involves devices (measuring devices, sensors, actuators) that are integrated into communication networks in the process industry (e.g. for measuring the flow of liquids in the chemical industry) and Industry 4.0. These devices are increasingly communicating contactlessly. Secure and resilient communication plays a crucial role in ensuring reliable operation in the process industry.

The objectives of the RILKOSAN project for the selected use case are:

• increasing the resilience of industrial communication systems
• increasing the availability of communication networks and the devices integrated into them
• researching and developing resilient architectures and special components
• Proof of resilience mechanisms and demonstration implementation for devices and networks in industrial applications in the process industry and Industry 4.0 sectors
• the introduction of boundary conditions and contributions to the resilience of industrial communication systems in the 6G platform

Topic: RILKOSAN plans to research and develop increased resilience for communication networks, which will lead to high availability of the networks used and the integrated devices. The selected use case with social relevance involves devices (measuring devices, sensors) that are integrated into communication networks in the process industry (e.g. for measuring the flow of liquids in the chemical industry) and Industry 4.0. To increase flexibility, these devices will also communicate wirelessly in the future. Increasing networking increases the potential for disruption and attack. Secure and resilient communication plays an important role in ensuring reliable operation in the process industry. For this reason, RILKOSAN is researching and developing resilience solutions for communication networks and processes as well as for the devices communicating in the network. The solutions are designed in such a way that they can also be integrated into overall concepts for communication systems (especially 5G and, in the future, 6G). The RILKOSAN project is researching and developing secure and resilient system architectures, security components and authentication mechanisms and, in particular, a large number of resilience components as well as application-related self-healing OT communication mechanisms for the selected exemplary industrial use case. The combination of the concepts, components and measures to be developed results in significantly increased resilience with resistance to external and internal disruptive influences.

In our sub-project of the RILIKOSAN project, UzL-ITI will focus on the following topics:

• A lightweight hardware-based fault resilient security module (L-HSM)
• Intelligent Intrusion Detection System, IDS and recovery mechanisms