Xage Security announced the first and only tamperproofing system for Industrial Internet of Things deployments. This new system extends the Xage security fabric’s blockchain-protected IoT tamperproofing technology beyond the core security and authentication architecture into individual controllers and devices, providing a patented security foundation for millions of industrial control systems and processes.
The Xage security fabric already distributes authentication and private data across a network of decentralized nodes to facilitate continuous machine-to-machine cooperation and trust at scale for industrial organizations. The company’s newly developed, blockchain-protected fingerprinting technology creates a unique digital replica of every physical machine and an immutable machine fingerprint record. Deployed on top of the Xage security fabric, digital replica fingerprinting creates identities and authentication for systems that don’t have them and detects changes made to a controller or device in real-time. If an unauthorized change is made, the Xage fabric will flag and isolate the affected device, securing the network against malware attacks that are otherwise undetectable.
“As industrial control systems are increasingly networked, and as shared networks are used across multiple devices, new IoT cyber attack vectors are opening up. Not surprisingly, the rate of attack is increasing dramatically, motivated by theft, vandalism, and state-sponsored infrastructure compromise. In the face of this escalating exposure, we need to address the underlying security risks of IoT adoption now, before it’s too late,” said Xage CEO, Duncan Greatwood. “For the first time, blockchain-protected fingerprinting delivers tamperproofing system-wide across industrial IoT processes, creating a fail-safe security layer that proactively mitigates vulnerability.”
Security for existing industrial systems – including remote terminal units (RTUs), SCADA-master (supervisory control computers), PLC (programmable logic controllers), and human-machine-interface (HMI) computers that have access to RTUs, SCADAs and PLCs – is often limited and reliant on the “air-gapping” or network-layer-blocking of local networks. These distributed components are particularly vulnerable to attack, especially as digital transformation leads to increased connectivity between networks, applications, and access in industries like energy, utilities, and manufacturing. Built to avoid single points of security failure and designed to protect legacy components, Xage’s solution is the first designed to fully tamperproof these mission critical systems.
