CKMI: Comprehensive Key Management Infrastructure Design for Industrial Automation and Control Systems

Industrial Automation and Control Systems (IACS) are broadly utilized in critical infrastructures for monitoring and controlling the industrial processes remotely. The real-time transmissions in such systems provoke security breaches. Many security breaches have been reported impacting society severely. Hence, it is essential to achieve secure communication between the devices for creating a secure environment. For this to be effective, the keys used for secure communication must be protected against unauthorized disclosure, misuse, alteration or loss, which can be taken care of by a Key Management Infrastructure. In this paper, by considering the generic industrial automation network, a comprehensive key management infrastructure (CKMI) is designed for IACS. To design such an infrastructure, the proposed scheme employs ECDH, matrix method, and polynomial crypto mechanisms. The proposed design handles all the standard key management operations, viz. key generation, device registration, key establishment, key storage, device addition, key revocation, key update, key recovery, key archival, and key de-registration and destruction. The design supports secure communication between the same and different levels of IACS devices. The proposed design can be applied for major industrial automation networks to handle the key management operations. The performance analysis and implementation results highlight the benefits of the proposed design

The Structure of TGBC_C Phases

We study the transition from the cholesteric phase to two TGB$_C$ phases near the upper critical twist $k_{c2}$: the Renn-Lubensky TGB$_C$ phase, with layer normal rotating in a plane perpendicular to the pitch axis, and the Bordeaux TGB$_C$ phase, with the layer normal rotating on a cone parallel to the pitch axis. We calculate properties, including order-parameter profiles, of both phases.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, Submitted to Physical Review E, Rapid Communications, September 5, 2003; Revised manuscript (to the paper submitted on March 18, 2003, cond-mat/0303365)that includes an important missing reference and presents an improved analysis of a generalized mode