In a “zero trust” world the IoT and Industrial IoT (IIoT) look to many enterprises, governments and other targets of cyber criminals like an ever-expanding attack surface nearly impossible to understand, much less control.
Beyond protection from outside threats, there are also internal threats (which have now surpassed external threats based on some reporting), and on top of that, data loss due to unintentional issues, for example misconfiguration of network and cloud access points.
The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and the International Data Spaces Association (IDSA) earlier this month announced they are collaborating to “improve trustworthiness of IIoT data” with an initiative designed to “support the secure exchange and the simple linking of data in business eco-systems on the basis of standards and by means of common governance models.”
This new liaison includes an agreement for the two to work together to solve data security and integrity challenges that many believe have slowed down progress given the frightening fragmentation real world projects have created, and proof-of-concepts and testbeds have surfaced in the process of development.
The IoT and IIoT are of no value without data; in fact, data is the lifeblood of connected systems, and until there is harmonization of the way data is exchanged between systems, how it is accounted for and audited large scale solutions will risk stalling out.
IIC Executive Director Richard Soley and IDSA Deputy Chairman of the Board Prof. Dr. Boris Otto of Fraunhofer ISST signed a memorandum of understanding that outlined the joint activities between the two organizations, with joint activities including:
- Identifying and sharing good practices;
- Realizing interoperability by harmonizing architecture and other elements;
- Collaborating on standardization;
- Emphasizing the focus concerning security and usage control of data in the IIRA integrating the trusted connector approach; and
- Promoting the cooperation and validating the architectural alignment by establishing at least one joint use case with companies using testbeds of the IIC.
“Data is the center of IoT innovation. Our collaboration will advance data sovereignty as one of the fundamental building blocks of the digital economy,” said Prof. Dr. Boris Otto, Deputy Chairman of the IDSA Board and Executive Director of Fraunhofer ISST.
“As data becomes more of an economic factor in IIoT, the collaboration between our two organizations will provide guidance to help accelerate the innovation of the IoT,” said IIC Executive Director Dr. Richard Soley.
“With billions of IoT devices collecting data, the trustworthiness of that data within ecosystems remains a key concern. This collaboration will help improve trustworthiness within ecosystems and IIoT solutions,” said Andreas Teuscher, Chair of the IDSA Architecture Working Group and Chief Industrial Security Officer of SICK AG.
“Data and trustworthiness are an important part of successful IoT adoption,” said Wael William Diab, Chair of the IIC Liaison Working Group, and Senior Director at Huawei. “The collaboration with IDSA adds to the industrial IoT ecosystem that IIC is driving.”
The IIC Liaison Working Group is the gateway for formal relationships with standards and open-source organizations, consortia, alliances, certification and testing bodies and government entities/agencies.
The IDSA has participants from 17 countries and includes more than 90 companies and institutions. Their mission is to guarantee data sovereignty by an open, vendor-independent architecture for a peer-to-peer network that provides usage control of data from all domains.
The IIC is a very active organization, with hundreds of members, projects and testbeds with a mission to deliver “a trustworthy IIoT in which the world’s systems and devices are securely connected and controlled to deliver transformational outcomes.” The IIC is a program of the Object Management Group (OMG).
Edited by
Ken Briodagh
