Comment by flowerlad
7 hours ago
Why are our water and power utilities connected to the internet? Is it so that the employees controlling them can work from home? If so they are accepting too much risk relative to the benefit.
7 hours ago
Why are our water and power utilities connected to the internet? Is it so that the employees controlling them can work from home? If so they are accepting too much risk relative to the benefit.
Because other replies aren't really stating it explicitly, let me add...
The water and power utilities are themselves large distributed systems. They need communications between elements just to function properly. They don't exist in a single location where people can go locally manage them in some air-gapped, offline fashion.
There is no option of not having a communication network to monitor and manage these geographically distributed elements. The question is which communication network you would use, and how you would secure it. Whether it is telephones, radio links, or people running around as messengers, it is still a communications network.
Will some "dedicated" network be any safer? If anything, I imagine the fantasy of a private network will lead to even less security. You cannot physically secure the entire signal path. You really need to treat it as untrusted and build your security on top with encryption, authentication, authorization, etc.
It makes sense to have them connected for a lot of reasons.
which reasons?
Remote monitoring is one of them presumably
2 replies →
In addition to remote monitoring, central control over large systems clearly has benefits: quickly and automatically spinning up a power generation in one location in response to an outage or just increased demand in another one, or conversely spooling down generation in response to a large demand spike going away (many factories need to notify the grid before starting up or shutting down), shutting down water/gas flow upstream of a detected leak, or yes, working from home, which lots of people here regularly argue is a good thing.
You could absolutely make the case that it isn't worth the risk, but that isn't the same as not having benefits.
think about a grid responding to demand. The old model (like the titanic) had a remote manager phoning the site lead who phoned the control room who phoned the engineering room.
Remote management has clear benefits, don’t be obtuse. I totally agree on the security risks, but the benefits are obvious.
I'm not seeing why it has to be connected to the internet. Make it a private, air-gapped intranet for all (or most) of the benefits of being "connected", but with no entry point for someone sitting on another continent to turn off the water.
mostly, because setting up a separate network is harder.
a virtual network built upon the regular internet is much easier.
And yes, mostly done wrong
1 reply →
Are you talking about the media layer or the application layer? What would be the alternative to using the internet media layer? Every utility running their own private media ? So a duplicate network of media, as broad physically as the internet, that’s not connected to the internet? That hackers could tap into, and with poorer security, because it wouldn’t be constantly probed.
Sounds like a good application of mesh networks.