From Standard to Practice: Towards ISA/IEC 62443-Conform Public Key Infrastructures

Abstract

Public key infrastructures (PKIs) are a cornerstone for the security of modern information systems. They also offer a wide range of security mechanisms to industrial automation and control systems (IACS) and can represent an important building block for concepts like zero trust architectures and defense in depth. Hence, the ISA/IEC 62443 series of standards addresses the PKI paradigm, but there is little practical guidance on how to actually apply it to an IACS. This paper analyzes ISA/IEC 62443 for explicit and implicit requirements regarding PKI deployment to provide a guideline for developing and operating a standard-conform PKI. For this purpose, the analyzed requirements and IACS-specific constraints are combined with current research and best practices. To assess its viability, a tangible PKI use case is implemented in a test environment. The evaluation of this use case shows that common IACS components are capable of supporting PKI, but that important features are missing. For instance, the handling of PKI turns out to be time-consuming and involves many manual operations, a potential factor to render large-scale operations impractical at this point in time.