XFEL. EU, Schenefeld, Germany
Cyber security aspects are often not thoroughly addressed in the design of light source SCADA system. In general the focus remains on building a reliable and fully-functional ecosystem. The underlying assumption is that a SCADA infrastructure is a closed ecosystem of sufficiently complex technologies to provide some security through trust and obscurity. However, considering the number of internal users, engineers, visiting scientists, students going in and out light source facilities cyber security threats can no longer be minored. At the European XFEL, we envision a comprehensive security layer for the entire SCADA infrastructure. There, Karabo [1], the control, data acquisition and analysis software shall implement these security paradigms known in IT but not applicable off-the-shelf to the FEL context. The challenges are considerable: (i) securing access to photon science hardware that has not been designed with security in mind; (ii) granting limited fine-grained permissions to external users; (iii) truly securing Control and Data acquisition APIs while preserving performance. Only tailored solution strategies, as presented in this paper, can fulfill these requirements.
[1] Heisen et al (2013) "Karabo: An Integrated Software Framework Combining Control, Data Management, and Scientific Computing Tasks". Proc. of 14th ICALEPCS 2013, Melbourne, Australia (p. FRCOAAB02)
