Industrial customers are demanding security solutions from their Operational Technology (OT) vendors due to the increasing number of security breaches and the risks associated with them. According to Trend Micro’s 2022 Industrial Cybersecurity report, industrial customers were disrupted at least six times in the past year, at an average cost of $2.8 million per incident. This has led to a tangible financial and reputational impact on businesses. OT equipment vendors need to respond to customer demand for better security while still delivering competitively priced solutions.
The top drivers leading to customer action are:
- Security audits and penetration tests revealing vulnerabilities,
- Experience with a recent breach leading to a board mandate to prevent future incidents,
- Requests from customers and partners, and
- Incidents at competitor sites.
PKI offers a cost-effective and scalable answer to these demands. OT OEMs can add a secure public key infrastructure (PKI) feature to their OT devices and upstream management servers. This will address the three fundamental issues causing the majority of incidents:
- Authentication for secure network access. By issuing unique identities in the form of digital certificates for every device it possible to authenticate them every time they request network access.
- Secure machine-to-machine communications. PKI helps safeguard data by providing end-to-end data encryption. This helps ensure the data stored in OT systems and the communication between IT and OT systems remain insulated from attacks. Encrypting communications also helps meet compliance requirements. Regulatory bodies, such as the NERC, FERC, NIST, and U.S. President Biden’s recent executive order on cybersecurity all require encryption.
- Data and Software integrity. Ensuring the firmware in OT systems is safe and free of corruption is crucial to avoid software supply chain attacks. PKI provides an effective means of verifying firmware authenticity and integrity through code signing. OT firmware suppliers can use PKI to digitally sign the firmware they are releasing to help organizations verify the identity of the supplier and confirm that the received firmware hasn’t been altered since its signing. This enables secure boot and protects OT systems from attacks.
PKI is highly flexible, time-tested over decades of use, and standardized for maximum security and interoperability.
SecureG provides a custom PKI system that that are purpose built for OEM OT systems. It delivers unique identities, securing the OT environment by putting identity-based security in every OT node. PKI is a must-have for securing operational technology, and it is cost-effective and flexible. Contact SecureG for more information on how a PKI can help you meet industrial customer demands for security.
Operational Technology (OT) is increasingly interconnected with information technology (IT) systems, expanding the attack surface. As a result, adversaries may exploit an IT access point or cloud vulnerability to break into internet-facing OT/Industrial Control Systems (ICS). Legacy perimeter-based security controls such as firewalls are no longer sufficient to protect OT systems against sophisticated attacks.
According to Trend Micro’s 2022 Industrial Cybersecurity report, industrial cybersecurity threats are becoming increasingly common and can have a significant financial and reputational impact on businesses. In the past 12 months, 72% of industrial customers were disrupted at least six times, at an average cost of $2.8 million per incident. These incidents can also lead to a loss of customer trust and brand reputation.
Fortunately, PKI is a low-cost, flexible, time-tested, and standardized solution that delivers on the three key capabilities necessary for OT system security: authentication, confidentiality, and integrity. By issuing unique identities in the form of digital certificates for every device and server in a customer system, PKI can authenticate endpoints before communicating with them, safeguard data by providing end-to-end data encryption, and prevent unauthorized changes to code or data. PKI ensures OT systems and data remain insulated from attacks, while also meeting compliance requirements.
OT environments present unique challenges for managing security, but PKI helps safeguard data by providing end-to-end data encryption, both at rest and in transit. Encrypting communications also helps meet compliance requirements. SecureG provides a customer-specific private PKI system that integrates with OEM OT devices and systems. It delivers unique identities for every device in a customer system.
PKI is also cost-effective and flexible. By adding PKI to devices, OT OEMs can deliver better security while delivering competitively priced solutions. It is also time-tested over decades of use and standardized for maximum security and interoperability. SecureG recognizes that every OEM is different, and partners with each of our customers to help design the security, policies, and procedures that make sense for their particular business.
PKI is future-proof and designed to evolve to meet future needs like changing encryption algorithms. It provides easy (and sustainable) scalability and can run on public SaaS cloud infrastructure or private networks for on-premises environments.
SecureG delivers a customer-specific private PKI system that integrates with OEM OT devices and systems, issuing unique identities for every device in a customer system and securing the overall OT environment. Contact SecureG today for more information on how you can satisfy customer demand for security in your OT solutions.
Industrial cybersecurity threats are becoming increasingly common and can have a significant financial and reputational impact on businesses. According to Trend Micro’s 2022 Industrial Cybersecurity report, 72% of industrial customers were disrupted at least 6 times in the past 12 months, at an average cost of $2.8 million per incident.
Operational Technology (OT) exploits are emerging as a significant threat to businesses today. As IT and OT environments become more interconnected, the attack surface expands, making it easier for adversaries to exploit vulnerabilities. Perimeter-based security controls such as firewalls are no longer enough to protect OT systems against sophisticated attacks. OT OEMs need to respond to customer needs in order to remain secure and competitive.
Public key infrastructure (PKI) is a low-cost, flexible, time-tested, and standardized solution that delivers on the three key capabilities necessary for OT system security: authentication, confidentiality, and integrity. PKI helps safeguard data by providing end-to-end data encryption, both at rest and in transit. It helps ensure data stored in OT systems and communication between IT and OT systems remain insulated from attacks. Encrypting communications also helps meet compliance requirements.
SecureG provides a customer-specific private PKI system that integrates with OEM OT devices and systems. It delivers unique identities to every device and server in a customer system. PKI is a must-have for securing operational technology, and it is cost-effective and flexible. By integrating PKI into IoT devices, OT OEMs deliver better security while maintaining competitively priced solutions.
Industrial cybersecurity threats are a significant concern for critical infrastructure, and OT exploits are becoming increasingly common. If you are thinking about how to add security to your OT product line, contact SecureG for help. We recognize that every OEM is different, and we partner with each of our customers to help design the security, policies, and procedures that make sense for your business.
Let’s be honest—Kubernetes is a big deal.
According to a Sentinel One article, “96% of organizations surveyed by CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) were either using or evaluating Kubernetes” in 2021.
Most in the industry will agree that Kubernetes (K8s) is powerful, convenient, and one of the most widely used platforms to organize containerized applications and services.
However, this convenience can lead to insecurities. If the DevOps team using Kubernetes does not engage the right security team to help them understand how to use it securely, the door is open to exploitable vulnerabilities.
A potential mistake security teams can make is to assume that the native PKI—certificates and private keys used for authentication of nodes and encryption of communications—is secure.
It is not. The tools used with Kubernetes for adding and managing networking properties are highly convenient, but they default to choices that are highly insecure. They also fail to implement the most important part of a PKI: an actual secure certificate authority.
The article goes on to give examples of some other exploits that work against Kubernetes, such as security tooling challenges. This includes default K8s configurations, least privilege implications, and the scalability of legacy security tools.
We’d like to add one more security recommendation: get in touch with SecureG for help before trying to deploy certificates. We can help you integrate a proper PKI solution into your system that can withstand the kinds of attacks now targeting critical infrastructure.
In this digital age, organizations are increasingly adopting cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes to manage their infrastructure and applications. With this shift comes new challenges, particularly when securing sensitive data and protecting critical infrastructure against cyber threats.
In a Venture Beat article discussing the benefits of viewing Kubernetes’ implementation within a Zero Trust perspective, Kubernetes’ vulnerabilities were found in its “relative newness and dynamic operating paradigm”, making the solution a target for cyberattackers.
A Zero Trust approach is essential to implementing Kubernetes securely, but there’s a few fundamental steps along the way.
First, security teams need to be asking questions and making decisions about what their policy rules are going to be for communications between their computing nodes. If the essential minimum types of connections and communications have not been identified, there is no way to know how to design a system securely.
‘Secure everything’ is a great idea—but can your team figure out all the details to actually do it? In practice, enterprise-scale services are so complex that they often cannot be fully secured in the way that Zero Trust demands. Some components (like Kubernetes clusters and nodes) are modern and more easily addressed, but security teams may not be capable of fully securing legacy applications.
Once a team has answered questions surrounding communication concerns, the next step towards implementing a version of Zero Trust is giving secure and trustworthy identities to all the nodes and applications in a system.
If you know the identities, you can apply a security policy to let them connect or enforce an exclusion as necessary.
Identities require digital certificates, and that’s where SecureG comes in.
Unlike traditional PKI, which was developed for web servers and employee credentials, SecureG’s solutions are designed for machine speed and machine scale—especially when there’s no human in the loop.
Our technology can help you build a strong PKI backed by the strongest possible root of trust for critical infrastructure. Contact us today to learn more.
