Securing RIO communications

[OlivierL]

ShaunR's recent topic on Security reminded me of a situation we explored in the summer and need to revisit at some point. We were looking for a method to protect the communication with a cRIO.

 

The situation is that we need to communicate between a cRIO and a host on an unsecured network (manufacturing environment.) We concluded that we needed some form of encryption as well as a standard login mechanism but identified that having a single symmetrical key would not provide enough protection (for various reasons and specific use cases.)

 

Therefore, we looked into SSL and LabVIEW Web Services because it already includes that library and all the security features that we need. We figured out that it would definitely offer the protection required but that would mean rewriting most of existing code to use Web Service instead or establish some for of communication through a new Web Service. Considering the amount of unknown and risks associated with modifying our code, we looked into an alternative and came up with the following scheme:

 

 

In short, we would use a Web Service for the initial login and create a new symmetrical key which would be passed to the host and to the main application on the target (cRIO) and would be used to encrypt/decrypt all data during the session. This way, we could still program all of our code in LabVIEW and easily download/deploy the services and applications to the Target using NI standard tools but benefit from proper security and only have to add fairly simple wrappers to some sections of our existing code.

 

I wonder if anyone else has already gone down that route to add protection to an existing application. Would you suggest a different implementation method or an easier path to a similar result? Is there some obvious pitfalls in this approach that we do not see?

[Bazse]

I would like to mention the WireQueue system created by the WireFlow team. Shameless plug: here is the link https://www.wirequeue.com/

 

WireQueue has been presented already in this forum in this topic.

 

WireQueue is a service for secure communication over the internet, specifically designed for targets running LabVIEW or LabVIEW RT from National Instruments.

[OlivierL]

Thanks. I should've added that the conversation moved to here: https://lavag.org/topic/19341-security-who-cares/page-2#entry116714