10. Safety and Security Checking

Internet-based control systems use the Internet as the communication medium to enable the remote monitoring and control of plants and to initiate global collaboration and data sharing between operators from geographically dispersed locations. However, connection to the Internet presents high safety and security risks to this new generation of control systems. Are we opening up our Internet-based control systems to trouble since a number of malicious hackers continually attack Web servers on the Internet? The new type of control systems will never be accepted by industry, if people do not have enough confidence in their safety and do not feel secure while using the system. This chapter presents a framework for security and safety checking used in the design of Internet-based control systems, which focuses on the security of control commands transferred over the Internet, actions to respond to malicious attacks, and system safety. The Internet-based control system introduced in Chap. 8 has been used as a case study to illustrate the implementation of the framework.