BTOB IOT & AI IN MOBILITY
CLEARSY is enhancing its portfolio with a cyber-secure gateway to safety-critical systems
Since its creation in 2001, CLEARSY is a major player in the industrial use of formal methods to improve the functional safety of systems and critical software. To enhance the capability of its already certified SIL4 vital computer, namely the CLEARSY Safety Platform, CLEARSY is designing a consistent hardware and software add-on solution to provide seamlessly secured connectivity to safety-critical applications.
In partnership with PROVENRUN, CLEARSY is designing a cyber secure gateway featuring the remote control and update of a safety computing node. This platform offers an EAL4+ level (Common Criteria standard, EAL7 being the highest level in terms of security) of security and is based on the use of a formally proven microkernel, formally meaning mathematically proved.
This innovative work ensures that the operating system executed on the gateway will always behave as expected whatever incoming packets are received on the network link. Thanks to this architecture the cybersecurity gateway is acting as a firewall and thus isolating the CLEARSY Safety Platform (vital-computer) from external threat.
The gateway offers the following capabilities:
- Allow remote upload of new safety-critical software. The authenticity of the source (software remote repository) and the authorization of pushing new safety critical software onto the device is ensured via private key and certificate. Thus, an attacker cannot push new software on a target deployed on the track or embedded within the train. None less to say, this channel is fully encrypted avoiding the leak of sensitive intellectual property that may be included inside the firmware under upload.
- Allow remote upload of new software for the gateway itself. This feature is critical in the sense that it allows the application of any potential future security patch (for example on secured protocol implemented by the system like IPsec, OpenVPN, …). This feature also offers the possibility of upgrading an already deployed system without unmounting the devices or sending a maintenance team on-site.
- Allow remote upload of new software for the gateway itself. This feature is critical in the sense that it allows the application of any potential future security patch (for example on secured protocol implemented by the system like IPsec, OpenVPN, …). This feature also offers the possibility of upgrading an already deployed system without unmounting the devices or sending a maintenance team on-site.
- Allow to retrieve operational data and send safety critical commands to the vital devices deployed on the field. This feature eases the integration of SCADA in your infrastructure, by making your on-field safety-critical devices reachable from everywhere without sacrificing the security of the system.
Combined with the CLEARSY Safety Platform, this cybersecurity gateway makes it possible to easily design distributed automation applications, connected through a public network such as the Internet with significant savings in terms of deployment costs (compared to wired logic or the deployment of proprietary networks).
A typical application of this solution is the interaction of distributed inputs/outputs on the fields (see diagram), where multiple nodes are deployed locally close to the trackside equipment (signal, switch, axle counter, …) and acquires field data. Thanks to the cyber secure gateway, these nodes can exchange operational data and decide on their own outputs’ state based on remote input. Currently,
in the railway industry, this application is mostly achieved by wired logic that requires many conductors, between the nodes. Such legacy designs are also complex to maintain and update as many wires are impacted during evolution.
With the secure gateway, the business logic between the nodes can be easily modified and propagated to the field as it is only a set of software parameters. Finally, the interface between the nodes is limited to a constant Ethernet interface, whatever the count of input and output.
Thanks to this know-how, CLEARSY can develop custom interface gateways between an existing automated system and an unprotected network while addressing cybersecurity risks. Thus, your existing or under-development applications can be more easily interconnected to external systems (SCADA, maintenance, monitoring, remote manual operations, etc.) to offer a better-integrated system to your end customers.
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