Security Verification of Third Party Design Files in Manufacturing

Customer-individual production in manufacturing is a current trend related to the Industrie 4.0 paradigm. Creation of design files by the customers is becoming more frequent. These design files are typically generated outside the company boundaries and then transferred to the organization where they are eventually processed and scheduled for production. From a security perspective, this introduces new attack vectors targeting producing companies. Design files with malicious configuration parameters can threaten the availability of the manufacturing plant resulting in financial risks and can even cause harm to humans. Human verification of design files is error-prone why an automated solution is required. A graph-theoretic modeling framework for machine tools capable of verifying the security of product designs is proposed. This framework is used to model an exemplary production process implemented in a wood processing plant based on the experiences of a real-world case study. Simulation of the modeled scenario shows the feasibility of the framework. Apart from security verification, the approach can be adopted to decide if a product design can be manufactured with a given set of machine tools.