DCS Security

Security has certainly been a hot topic in the automation and control over the past few years — but it has really heated up in the past few months. There’s been so much news on this front that this blog entry marks the 3^rd post on the subject since the blog’s inception just six weeks ago. (See the most recent post on the Stuxnet investigation here.)

As a result of the increasing focus on automation and control system security, vendors are starting to regularly release updates on the status of their efforts to secure the systems they provide. One of these recent announcements came from Invensys Operations Management, which announced that its Foxboro I/A Series distributed control system (DCS) operator workstations have passed the Achilles Cyber Security Certification test. This test was performed by Wurldtech Security Technologies and was conducted on the Foxboro I/A Series Model P92 Workstation for Windows hardware and I/A Series AW70 human machine interface (HMI) software for the Microsoft Windows XP operating system, including I/A Series FoxView, FoxAlert, Alarm Manager and System Manager applications.

WurldTech offers security analysis and certification services to industrial equipment manufacturers and system integrators.

According to Invensys, the I/A Series Model P92 workstations are the first host-based devices to achieve this globally recognized benchmark for communications security. (Note: Host-based devices are defined by the ISA99 security standard as general-purpose devices running general-purpose operating systems capable of hosting one or more applications or data stores. Examples include HMIs, engineering workstations, historian servers and domain controllers.)

To see if the automation and control products you have or are considering purchasing have passed the Achilles Level 1 Certification, click here to access a lists of certified embedded controllers, host devices, control applications and network components.