Securing Automation Systems Against Malware Intrusion

Abstract

Conventional measures do not sufficiently protect computing systems anymore against intruders and malware of any kind. The main reason for this is that the system architectures are based on highly insecure and error-prone foundations. Whereas some time ago this shortcoming could still be partially coped with by swift counteraction, today this “race” must be considered lost right from the start due to the fast data networks. There are no reactive measures anymore that could compensate for the aggressors' temporal advantage. Since computers employed for automation and control purposes are more and more connected to networks and are, thus, endangered by malware, new architectures for their hardware and software as presented in this paper are necessary, which solve the security problems by their intrinsic properties.