Dynamic Access Control in Industry 4.0 Systems

Industry 4.0 enacts ad-hoc cooperation between machines, humans, and organizations in supply and production chains. The cooperation goes beyond rigid hierarchical process structures and increases the levels of efficiency, customization, and individualisation of end-products. Efficient processing and cooperation requires exploiting various sensor and process data and sharing them across various entities including computer systems, machines, mobile devices, humans, and organisations. Access control is a common security mechanism to control data sharing between involved parties. However, access control to virtual resources is not sufficient in presence of Industry 4.0 because physical access has a considerable effect on the protection of information and systems. In addition, access control mechanisms have to become capable of handling dynamically changing situations arising from ad-hoc horizontal cooperation or changes in the environment of Industry 4.0 systems. Established access control mechanisms do not consider dynamic changes and the combination with physical access control yet. Approaches trying to address these shortcomings exist but often do not consider howto get information such as the sensitivity of exchanged information. This chapter proposes a novel approach to control physical and virtual access tied to the dynamics of custom product engineering, hence, establishing confidentiality in ad-hoc horizontal processes. The approach combines static design-time analyses to discover data properties with a dynamic runtime access control approach that evaluates policies protecting virtual and physical assets. The runtime part uses data properties derived from the static design-time analysis, as well as the environment or system status to decide about access.