Survey on Application of Trusted Computing in Industrial Control Systems

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, also known as Industrial 4.0, has greatly accelerated inter-connectivity and smart automation in industrial control systems (ICSs), which has introduced new challenges to their security. With the fast growth of the Internet of Things and the advent of 5G/6G, the collaboration of Artificial Intelligence (Al) and the Internet of Things (loT) in ICSs has also introduced lots of security issues as it highly relies on advanced communication and networking techniques. Frequent ICS security incidents have demonstrated that attackers have the ability to stealthily breach the current system defenses and cause catastrophic effects to ICSs. Thankfully, trusted computing technology, which has been a popular research topic in the field of information security in recent years, offers distinct advantages when applied to ICSs. In this paper, we first analyze the vulnerabilities of ICSs and the limitations of existing protection technologies. Then, we introduce the concept of trusted computing and present a security framework for ICSs based on Trusted Computing 3.0. Finally, we discuss potential future research directions.