The Future Internet of Things and Security of its Control Systems
This is an incremental perspective on securing IoT-based industrial systems, relevant for cybersecurity professionals and industries transitioning to IoT.
The paper addresses the cybersecurity challenges of future industrial control systems as they evolve into Internet of Things (IoT) environments, proposing that security will rely on agility, moving-target defenses, and autonomous behaviors.
We consider the future cyber security of industrial control systems. As best as we can see, much of this future unfolds in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT). In fact, we envision that all industrial and infrastructure environments, and cyber-physical systems in general, will take the form reminiscent of what today is referred to as the IoT. IoT is envisioned as multitude of heterogeneous devices densely interconnected and communicating with the objective of accomplishing a diverse range of objectives, often collaboratively. One can argue that in the relatively near future, the IoT construct will subsume industrial plants, infrastructures, housing and other systems that today are controlled by ICS and SCADA systems. In the IoT environments, cybersecurity will derive largely from system agility, moving-target defenses, cybermaneuvering, and other autonomous or semi-autonomous behaviors. Cyber security of IoT may also benefit from new design methods for mixed-trusted systems; and from big data analytics -- predictive and autonomous.