2.4. Critical Infrastructure Control

2.4. Critical Infrastructure Control

Potentially harmful physical equipment (e.g., power grid, traffic control, hazardous chemical processing, etc.) is connected to a network in support of critical infrastructure. The organization managing such infrastructure needs to ensure that only authorized code and users can control corresponding critical processes, and that these processes are protected from unauthorized manipulation or other threats. When a protocol operation can affect a critical system component of the infrastructure, devices attached to that critical component require some assurances depending on the security context, including assurances that a requesting device or application has not been compromised and the requesters and actors act on applicable policies. As such, remote attestation can be used to only accept commands from requesters that are within policy.

Attester: A device or application wishing to control physical equipment.

Relying Party: A device or application connected to potentially dangerous physical equipment (hazardous chemical processing, traffic control, power grid, etc.).