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With its versatility, flexibility, adaptability and high performance, 5G is a pioneering communications standard for industry and society. In particular, the development of private networks, often referred to as campus networks, is playing an increasingly important role here, as individual applications and usage requirements can be covered by an autonomous communication network. In this work, a private 5G network deployment including the setup of a 5G core network and radio access network is presented. With the proposed methods, a 5G core can be installed in less than 30 minutes. The evaluation of the proposed 5G system shows that 5G campus networks are capable of the demands for the different use cases of 5G. Furthermore, software tools for easy monitoring the health and status of the network are developed within this work.
Industry 4.0 Security Trust Anchors : Considering Supply Voltage Effects on SRAM-PUF Reliability
(2023)
The ongoing development towards the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and the industrial metaverse pose several challenges for both, customers and manufacturers. These relate mainly to security, usability and energy consumption of the utilized hardware. As most industrial use-cases are referring on traditional communication scenarios and considering data generated and exchanged between producer and consumers, there is a fundamental need for confidentially, integrity and authenticity within the systems. A worthwhile approach to meeting these requirements are Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs): Semiconductors, which are - based on nano-scale and uncontrollable imperfections occurring during manufacturing of the microchip - in particular suitable for resource-constrained and lightweight applications. Potential implementations for PUF thereby range from unique device’s fingerprint, to secret key derivation, to seeds for True Random Number Generators (TRNGs). This work proposes another potential application of SRAM-PUFs, specifically as an additional source of entropy for a Password-Based Key Derivation Function (PBKDF) communication scheme. Apart from an evaluation of the proposed concept, the suitability of SRAM cells is demonstrated by a dependence study on the effects of supply voltage fluctuation.
Radio-based communication systems such as 5G and the upcoming 6G are playing an increasingly important role in the industrial environment. Especially in the context of Industry 4.0, flexibility in communication is becoming increasingly important. More and more sensors, actuators or assemblies in general must be securely networked. The use of wired transmission technology is generally considered very reliable, but offers immense disadvantages in terms of flexibility. Moving components, for example rotating units, or Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV)s represent a central weak point here. Especially in the industrial environment, 5G campus networks will provide essential contributions to solving these challenges. However, the use of radio-based transmission technology requires detailed planning, which must be taken into account as early as the design stage of a system, since shadowing or multipath-propagation, for example, could interfere with communication. Especially for Industry 4.0, the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) offers an approach for the preliminary integration of 5Gbased communication into the value chain, which can also be used as a basis for a 5G-Digital Twin (DT). This paper considers the relevance of the topic, the work already underway in industry, and also in standardization. Finally, an exemplary preparation of relevant parameters for the creation of a AAS submodel is given.
Physically unclonable functions (PUFs) are a promising way of introducing hardware-based security primitives into widely used digital systems such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices or Industry 4.0 production plants. Former research attempts focused on conceptually evaluating SRAM PUFs in particular, thus forming the theoretical basis for this paper. The real-world applicability of the proposed SRAM PUFs has hardly been shown before. Therefore, this paper contributes an SRAM PUF implementation based on commodity off-the-shelf (CoTS) hardware, in particular an ESP32 microcontroller. Most notably, the proposed concept does not require any additional hardware. This is a decisive factor for the overall applicability in real-world scenarios since it can be executed on every general-purpose ESP32 microcontroller. Furthermore, this paper provides a detailed PUF algorithm overview which has also been implemented in soft- and hardware. To support the various theoretical benefits of the proposed system, a statistical evaluation of the robustness and overall performance of the PUF concept is also part of this paper. The results show, that the ESP32 SRAM PUF concept allows for a secure on-device authentication based on nanoscale hardware variations during the manufacturing of the ESP32 SRAM cells.
Modern Public Key Infrastructures (PKIs) allow users to create and maintain centrally stored cryptographic certificates. These infrastructures use a so-called certificate chain. At the root of the chain, a root Certification Authority (CA) is responsible for issuing the base certificate. Every verification and certification step within the chain is based upon the security of said root CA. Thus, its operation security is of great concern. Since the root certificates are stored locally on the root CA, any Denial of Service (DoS) attack may render the whole certificate chain, which is based on of the attacked root CA, inoperable. Therefore, this article evaluates different approaches to a decentralized data storage system that is based on the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). To show the real-world potential of the proposed approaches, we also evaluate the different technologies using a novel PKI mechanism called Near Field Communication Key Exchange (NFC-KE). The results indicate that modern distributed data storage solutions such as Interplanetary Filesystem (IPFS) and SIA can have significant performance and decentralization benefits in comparison to purely Blockchain-based technologies like Hyperledger Fabric. However, they lack any Smart Contract functionality, which requires a software developer to implement verification mechanisms in centralized software solutions.
Buildings involve multiple participants and materials that must work together throughout their life cycle, from initial planning to decommissioning and recycling. This can create safety concerns, particularly with regard to critical components. Detailed documentation and tracking of product characteristics are necessary, as well as outlining the related obligations of the parties involved. Currently, this problem is often addressed by numerous contracts and paper‐based building documentation. Blockchain technology could prove to be a future‐oriented solution to such use cases. Additionally, so‐called Smart Contracts, which are custom‐designed applications running on the given Blockchain platform, can be an appropriate way for documentation in the construction and facility management process since they allow distribution of their execution to the entirety of the involved Blockchain participants. Based on this approach, this paper presents a platform solution that provides up‐to‐date product information on various components. The outcome is a system that facilitates digital documentation on a secure legal foundation, with an interface tailored to the specific terms and conditions of each partner involved in the construction and maintenance process.
Performance Comparison of Directed Acyclic Graph-Based Distributed Ledgers and Blockchain Platforms
(2023)
Since the introduction of the first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, in 2008, the gain in popularity of distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) has led to an increasing demand and, consequently, a larger number of network participants in general. Scaling blockchain-based solutions to cope with several thousand transactions per second or with a growing number of nodes has always been a desirable goal for most developers. Enabling these performance metrics can lead to further acceptance of DLTs and even faster systems in general. With the introduction of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) as the underlying data structure to store the transactions within the distributed ledger, major performance gains have been achieved. In this article, we review the most prominent directed acyclic graph platforms and evaluate their key performance indicators in terms of transaction throughput and network latency. The evaluation aims to show whether the theoretically improved scalability of DAGs also applies in practice. For this, we set up multiple test networks for each DAG and blockchain framework and conducted broad performance measurements to have a mutual basis for comparison between the different solutions. Using the transactions per second numbers of each technology, we created a side-by-side evaluation that allows for a direct scalability estimation of the systems. Our findings support the fact that, due to their internal, more parallelly oriented data structure, DAG-based solutions offer significantly higher transaction throughput in comparison to blockchain-based platforms. Although, due to their relatively early maturity state, fully DAG-based platforms need to further evolve in their feature set to reach the same level of programmability and spread as modern blockchain platforms. With our findings at hand, developers of modern digital storage systems are able to reasonably determine whether to use a DAG-based distributed ledger technology solution in their production environment, i.e., replacing a database system with a DAG platform. Furthermore, we provide two real-world application scenarios, one being smart grid communication and the other originating from trusted supply chain management, that benefit from the introduction of DAG-based technologies.