Cyberattacks and Vociferous Implications on SECS/GEM Communications in Industry 4.0 Ecosystem

Information and communications technology (ICT) is prevalent in almost every field of industrial production and manufacturing processes at present. A typical industry network consists of sensors, actuators, devices, and services to connect, track, and manage production processes to increase performance and boost productivity. The SEMI Equipment Communications Standard/Generic Equipment Model (SECS/GEM) is SEMI's Machine-to-Machine (M2M) protocol for equipment-to-host data communications. It is the most popular and profoundly used M2M communication protocol operating in the manufacturing industry. With Industry 4.0 as a guiding factor, connectivity to business networks is required for accessing real-time data whenever and wherever needed. This openness of connectivity raises security concerns as SECS/GEM protocol offers no security, which endangers exposing the manufacturing industries' business secrets and production processes. This paper discusses the key processes involved in SECS/GEM communications and how potential attackers can manipulate these processes to obtain illegal or unauthorized access. The experiments' results indicate that the SECS/GEM processes are entirely vulnerable to numerous attacks, including DoS attack, Replay attack, and False-Data-Injection-Attack. Thus, the future direction involves developing a prevention mechanism that aims at securing the SECS/GEM processes in the industrial network. This study's findings are useful as preliminary guidance for the infrastructure owners to plan for appropriate security measures to protect the industrial network.

@article{Laghari2021,
  title     = {Cyberattacks and Vociferous Implications on SECS/GEM Communications in Industry 4.0 Ecosystem},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {12},
  number    = {7},
  year      = {2021},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Shams A. Laghari and Selvakumar Manickam and Shankar Karuppayah and Ayman Al-Ani and Shafiq Ul Rehman},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2021.0120737},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2021.0120737}
}