The WebLabs of the University of Cambridge: A study of securing remote instrumentation

Abstract

Safe deployment of web interfaces for remote instrumentation requires that the laboratory system be protected from harmful manipulation by end users or attacks from malicious software over the internet. Industrial control systems, although highly relevant to contemporary engineering education and an essential component of many remote experiments, are typically only designed to run in a secured local area network and cannot safely be exposed to the internet because they lack a sufficiently robust security infrastructure. They also typically require the installation of proprietary software on the end user system which is an obstacle for deployment in learning scenarios at universities. Facing these challenges when bringing the Chemical Engineering WebLabs at the University of Cambridge online, the Computing Center of the University of Stuttgart and the University of Cambridge developed a framework to allow the secure deployment of industrial controller software in remote learning applications; this framework is generic, has a low-barrier for students as it only requires an internet browser and Java™ installation, and it satisfies the high security demands of most university infrastructure providers. Furthermore, the framework has the potential to be applied to almost any remote laboratory setup and is compatible with all commonly-used operating systems at the user end.