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HyperSecured PLC: Security for Automation Solutions

Berlin, February 22, 2011 - Under the motto “Security meets Automation”, KW-Software and Innominate present technologies and solutions for industrial network security at the stand of Wind River during the embedded world 2011.

With the HyperSecured PLC, the trend for virtualisation and hardware consolidation for automation users is within practical reach. For the first time, a software PLC and a security appliance were integrated on an embedded IPC with the Hypervisor by technology partner Wind River as virtual machines to form a secured control solution against network attacks. Based on an Intel ATOM Z530 processor, the embedded hardware is divided into two virtualised applications by the Hypervisor. The security application, the virtual mGuard, runs under Linux and monitors communication with the network. The software PLC with Profinet communication runs under VxWorks and communicates with the outside world only through mGuard. A desktop PC is used for IEC 61131 programming and Profinet configuration. The mGuard is configured via the web interface in the browser.

Up to now, such control solutions could only be configured with respective dedicated hardware for the PLC and for the security appliance. With the trend to virtualisation, now more cost-effective solutions which are integrated on a CPU can be created. A prerequisite for this are hardware-independent software components and an industrially usable Hypervisor for different processor architectures.

An attack on the HyperSecured PLC, as with Stuxnet on the control technology from Siemens, would have little chance of success, as the virtual mGuard user firewall prevents unauthorised development access to the control and the mGuard Integrity Monitoring procedure would have detected manipulations of the engineering PCs, even through to date unknown malicious software early.

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