Title: Securing RS485 bus technology with ABE in industry 4.0 and smart home settings

Description:

Since the development of the world wide web the internet has expanded further and further into our daily lives. Today in smart home and industry settings ever more devices and machines communicate without any human interaction, building products and taking care of our living environment. With this increase in communication, security has become an important topic to protect business data and private data in industry as well as in our homes. Many communication systems in these settings make use of bus technology to connect devices in a network. In many cases the RS-485 standard is employed. Because busses are possible targets for cyber attacks and all devices connected to a bus can listen to all of the data traffic they need to be secured. Attribute-based encryption is an asymmetric cryptographic method, where keys consist of sets of descriptive attributes. Keys are managed by a central authority. This makes attribute-based encryption a sensible candidate to secure bus technologies, by supplying a form of access control to the data sent over the bus. Questionable is whether ABE is a practical solution in smart home and industry settings, because many devices in these settings might lack the appropriate computing power. For this thesis a prototypical software is developed and the possibility and viability of securing RS-485 bus technology with attribute-based encryption is assessed.

Supervisor: Dirk Thatmann

Type:  Master Thesis

Duration: 4 months