Automated Security Analysis System for Industrial Plants
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Solution Overview
Problem
There is a lack of automated tools for safety assessment and compliance with security regulations in industrial environments, leading to manual and incomplete analyses that are prone to errors and difficult to reproduce, especially in safety-critical systems.
Innovation Solution
An automated method and device that utilize a metadata-based analysis rule set to classify security threats, generate user-specific analysis rules, and perform a comprehensive safety assessment across a plant's lifecycle, integrating asset inventory, threat analysis, and measure definition.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If manual security analysis is performed, then flexibility in evaluation is maintained, but error-proneness and lack of reproducibility increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system enables automated self-assessment of security requirements by automatically collecting asset information, evaluating it against predefined criteria, and generating compliance reports without manual intervention, thereby ensuring reproducibility while maintaining evaluation flexibility through configurable parameters
Solution Approach 2:
The patent replaces manual mechanical analysis processes with automated computational systems that systematically evaluate security requirements, eliminating human error and ensuring consistent reproducible results across different assessments while maintaining the ability to adapt evaluation criteria
2Reliability
If comprehensive security assessment is performed manually, then completeness of analysis is improved, but time consumption and resource requirements increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary automated collection and organization of asset information before the actual security assessment, preparing structured data that can be rapidly evaluated against security criteria, thereby ensuring comprehensive coverage while significantly reducing the time required for the assessment itself
Solution Approach 2:
The patent creates digital representations (copies) of physical assets and their security attributes, allowing automated systematic evaluation of comprehensive security requirements without the time-consuming manual inspection of each actual asset, thereby maintaining completeness while reducing assessment time
3Measurement precision
If detailed asset information is collected manually, then accuracy of security evaluation is improved, but complexity of data collection increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system employs universal automated data collection mechanisms that can systematically gather detailed asset information across diverse asset types through standardized interfaces, ensuring accurate security evaluation while reducing collection complexity through consistent multi-functional approaches
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces automated intermediary systems that act as mediators between assets and the evaluation process, systematically collecting and structuring detailed asset information according to predefined criteria, thereby ensuring evaluation accuracy while simplifying the data collection process through automated mediation
Data Source
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AI summary
The invention relates to a method for conducting plant-wide security assessments that are not limited to automation components from a single manufacturer but function across manufacturers. Through suitable user guidance and automated support for the process-compliant execution of assessments, incident handling, and the definition and tracking of security measures, the method exhibits a high degree of user-friendliness. A rule generator uses security criteria to extract user-specific analysis rules from a complex set of rules with numerous input variables. All plant-relevant data is automatically compiled in an inventory. The automated security auditor applies the user-specific rule set to the collected plant data from the asset inventory and generates the audit trails.