ECC Implementation and Performance Evaluation for Securing OPC UA Communication

Protecting critical infrastructures and manufacturing plants in the context of Industry 4.0 against cyber-attacks is a nowadays challenge due to lack or insufficient security mechanisms for the communication protocols. Even though new protocols are considering built-in security (e.g. OPC UA) there is still a struggle for assuring interoperability and interconnectivity in the IoT era while dealing with resource constrained devices. This paper attempts to implement and evaluate a solution for assuring the authenticity and integrity of the data transmitted through OPC UA protocol in a client- server communication based on ECC as an alternative to the existing implemented solution which uses RSA. We choose ECC since it can achieve similar level of security as RSA for smaller key size and in order to respond to the limited memory and resource constrained elements part of an industrial system. Furthermore, we aim to evaluate through measurements the performance of different ECC key sizes in respect to the latency introduced by each cryptographic operation.