Sensor Shield Cybersecurity

Sensor Shield: End-to-End Protection for Industry 4.0 Sensor Systems

 Sensor Shield: End-to-End Protection for Sensor Systems

Industry 4.0, also called the Fourth Industrial Revolution, is a critical shift for companies, industries, and nations in the ever-changing technology landscape. Industry 4.0 is the rapid proliferation of digital technologies, such as Big Data, Internet of Things (IoT), analytics, and Artificial Intelligence (AI), that are used to streamline automate processes and digitize manufacturing while minimizing waste and maximizing output.

By implementing Industry 4.0 technologies, organizations can shorten lead times, reduce operational costs, optimize productivity, and offer better customer service, while also unlocking opportunities such as customized services or automated data analysis that could be used to create more value-added products or gain increasingly valuable insights into their customer base.

To make decisions, both human analysts and automated systems rely upon digital sensors to better understand the physical operating environment. However, sensors are often the most vulnerable part of a cyber-physical system.  Connected sensors are susceptible to adversarial attacks such as sensor spoofing, where the inputs-to or outputs-of a sensor are manipulated to disable, damage, or take control of critical systems.

This type of sensor spoofing attack has already emerged – notably the 2011 Iranian GPS spoofing attack which tricked a U.S. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to land in hostile territory. As cyber-physical sensor suites proliferate, systems will have more breach points and malicious sensor spoofing attacks will become more frequent and severe. Detection and prevention of sensor attacks is mission critical as systems increasingly use sensor data for automated decision making in critical infrastructure, utilities, medical devices, and autonomous vehicles.

Sensor Shield is a new tool in cybersecurity defense, based on a simple idea: that sensors within a system are all observing the same environment, albeit from different perspectives, and therefore have overlapping information. Sensor Shield is designed to identify this overlapping data in order to define relationships that exist between the sensors of a system.

Sensor Shield encompasses multiple methods for defining sensor relationships, ranging from physical laws to state-of-the-art, nonlinear manifold learning algorithms. Data relationships are evaluated in real-time; then based on which relationships are satisfied and which are violated, Sensor Shield can respond with predictive and prescriptive actions.

Sensor Shield can detect both sensor spoofing attacks and physical operation or maintenance issues, isolate these false inputs to individual sensors, and provide surrogate data to use in lieu of raw data as a way to mitigate the attack.