An Authorization Service supporting Dynamic Access Control in Manufacturing Systems

Cybersecurity is of increasing importance in industrial automation systems. The use of fine-grained and intelligent access control is paramount in emerging manufacturing systems as implicit trust is no longer a viable assumption for interactions within industrial systems. An authorization service is a central component of an access control enforcement architecture, to which resource servers may outsource parts of the policy decision functionality. This paper investigates how to create and integrate an authorization service in an industrial manufacturing system, which uses workflow descriptions combined with operational system states for policy decisions. The implementation is demonstrated in the use case of recipe orchestration in a modular automation system, and a few key quality metrics of the authorization service are evaluated.