April 2011

Unmatched Industrial Security

In a traditional office network environment, great care is taken to protect the file servers with the thought that client stations are less critical.  In industrial networks, however, the client stations are just as important.  Clients can be PLC's, I/O drops, SCADA/HMI nodes, etc.  Unauthorized access to industrial clients could cause injury to machinery or personnel!

One of the recent articles on this topic can be found here.

The above referenced article discusses the importance of hardware firewalls, routers and VPN's in protecting systems.  However, it can be cost prohibitive to put a hardware security device on every node.

SoftPLC solves this issue by embedding the security into our PAC's/PLC's/RTU's and I/O adapters:

* All Smart products include a router / 4 port managed Ethernet switch (see column right)

*  Any Smart product can have an embedded firewall with VPN, via an inexpensive firmware option. Features include:

• Stateful inspection firewall security
• Multiple VPN tunnels
  
• NAT/IP Masquerading
• SYN Denial of Service
• PPTP
• DHCP/BOOTP Server & BOOTP gateway/relay
• Port Forwarding, Blacklisting
• License for unlimited, simultaneous users
• Pre-defined configuration templates

The SoftPLC embedded Firewall Option (Cat No GC-FW) addresses the need to protect client nodes inexpensively, so that control systems can be extremely secure from both external and internal threats.

We also offer in our Gatecraft® product line, stand-alone hardware industrial firewalls.

For more information, contact SoftPLC.

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SoftPLC Helps Stop Intruders

An ISP and mobile phone service provider has five separate equipment locations in the city, connected by fiber.  They use SoftPLC to monitor/control environmental and security conditions (burglar alarm, fire alarm, temperature, UPS status, water alarm, etc.).

Environmental information/alarms are sent from the SoftPLC's to a central SCADA system at the main location.   A  web cam feed is also provided, primarily for security monitoring.

The company was concerned that control room operators would become immune to a continuous video feed and possibly miss an event.  Using the SoftPLC Programmer's toolkit, the user developed a custom routine that runs in the SoftPLC to implement SNMP traps.  Thus, the SoftPLC systems can trigger live camera images only upon an intrusion alarm or detection of motion.

Combining I/O control, communications and the ability for the user to customize the web cam interface, SoftPLC was the perfect choice to make this application easy to implement and maintain.

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