Comment by lxgr
8 hours ago
To not control any industrial processes remotely? I hope you realize that requiring that would make solar and wind farms completely non-viable, among many, many other things.
8 hours ago
To not control any industrial processes remotely? I hope you realize that requiring that would make solar and wind farms completely non-viable, among many, many other things.
Leased lines, MPLS, custom routing setups, hell just a VPN that fails closed. There are so many options for doing this, all more secure that just slapping a device online behind whatever router the cheapest ISP gave you.
The problem is that many of these setups are put behind essentially consumer connections, but with a better support contract or simply fitted with a 5G modem and a SIM card from the cell provider with the cheapest plan.
Building a WAN isn't magic, but it does require working with (competent) ISPs and paying the higher cost.
Remote control does not mean "has a public IP address."
Yes you might need to be able to centrally monitor and manage things but that should be happening on a private network.
A public IP address may be a necessity, but with a properly configured VPN it is irrelevant whether anyone knows the public IP addresses.
Surely, there must be a way that does not force the devices onto world wide web..
Seems like 95% of devices could be managed with a hardware filter that only allows through a handful of very rudimentary signals (more like Morse code than a full digital transmission), and then of course a properly designed on-device API that defines those signals and doesn't allow you to trigger a defrost remotely, when that should only ever be done with somebody physically present for example.
Morse code is a fully digital transmission.
How exactly would a more obscure (or even “analog”) encoding help? This seems orthogonal to reducing surface complexity and remotely executable command subsets.
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I'm interested to know how many "legacy" controllers no longer patched by the manufacturer are operating solar and wind farms today.
If it's a lot, maybe the manufacturers should be compelled to provide security patches if remote control is required to operate their products. For the sake of national security, of course.