Towards Availability of Strong Authentication in Remote and Disruption-Prone Operational Technology Environments

What is it about?

Strong Authentication in Remote and Disruption-Prone Operational Technology (OT) and Industrial control system (ICS) Environments

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Why is it important?

Implementing strong authentication methods in a network requires stable connectivity between the service providers deployed within the network (i.e., applications that users of the network need to access) and the Identity and Access Management (IAM) server located at the core segment of the network. This becomes challenging when it comes to Operational Technology (OT) systems deployed in a remote area, as they often get disconnected from the core segment of the network owing to unavoidable network disruptions. As a result, weak authentication methods and shared credential approaches are still adopted in these OT environments, exposing system vulnerabilities to increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. In this work, we propose a solution to enable highly available multifactor authentication (MFA) services for OT environments.