Admittance Mechanism for Automated Software Access Control
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Solution Overview
Problem
In industrial settings, especially in hard-to-reach and critical environments like refineries and power plants, existing technologies lack an efficient mechanism to manage the admittance of software items into computing devices, leading to potential malfunctions and the need for costly and dangerous human intervention for maintenance or fault restoration.
Innovation Solution
A dynamic rule-based system with an admittance mechanism that determines whether interactions between software items and computing devices are allowed by applying a set of rules, ensuring compliance with placement criteria, and utilizing a controller to bring devices to a controlled state for access management.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If manual human intervention is used to restore faults in critical industrial computing systems, then system reliability can be maintained, but operational safety decreases and downtime increases due to the dangerous and costly nature of human access to hard-to-reach environments
Solution Approach 1:
The computing device performs self-diagnosis and self-restoration through an automated admittance mechanism that monitors system state, identifies faults, and executes recovery procedures without human intervention. The device brings itself to a controlled state, evaluates access requests from software items, and restores normal operation autonomously, eliminating the need for dangerous manual intervention while maintaining system reliability.
2Reliability
If manual human intervention is used to restore faults in critical industrial computing systems, then system reliability can be maintained, but productivity decreases due to increased downtime from costly and dangerous human access
Solution Approach 1:
The computing device performs self-diagnosis and self-restoration through an automated admittance mechanism that monitors system state, identifies faults, and executes recovery procedures without human intervention. The device brings itself to a controlled state, evaluates access requests from software items, and restores normal operation autonomously, eliminating the need for dangerous manual intervention while maintaining system reliability.
Solution Approach 2:
The computing device proactively brings itself to a controlled state upon detecting a fault, before attempting restoration. This preliminary action prepares the system in advance for safe software item access, ensuring that restoration operations can be performed quickly and safely without waiting for human intervention, thereby minimizing downtime and maintaining productivity.
3Ease of operation
If software items are allowed to access computing devices without strict control, then ease of operation increases, but system integrity and security deteriorate due to potential rule violations
Solution Approach 1:
The computing device acts as an intermediary between software items and the controlled environment. It receives access requests from software items, evaluates them against stored rules, and selectively grants or denies access. This intermediary function enables automated control while maintaining system integrity, as the device mediates all interactions and ensures rule compliance before allowing any software item to access the controlled environment.
4Reliability
If a dynamic rule-based admittance mechanism is implemented, then system security and integrity are improved, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The computing device stores copies of rules in its memory that were originally defined by operators or administrators. Instead of requiring complex real-time rule evaluation logic, the device copies and caches these rules for efficient local evaluation. This copying approach simplifies the control mechanism while maintaining comprehensive rule-based security, as the device can quickly compare access requests against stored rule copies without complex processing.
Data Source
AI summary
One embodiment is a first computing system configured to control a second computing system, a software module configured to attempt to interact with the second computing system once the second computing system is brought to a first state by the first computing system, and an admittance mechanism configured to determine if the interaction is allowed to occur.