Educational project for remote access to industrial networks

This paper proposes a project to teach in a practical way several key factors of the Industry 4.0 technologies for electrical engineering students and teachers. The key factors are cibersecurity in industrial networks, industrial SCADA protocols and remote maintenance. Remote access to industrial networks is one of the contributions that Industry 4.0 has popularized because it makes industrial networks reachable using the public Internet. Remote maintenance is one of the great beneficiaries of this functionality. However, this access increases the security risks because a new and important vulnerability is opened by the access possibility from any computer connected to the Internet. To address this challenge, engineering students have to deal with industrial protocols topics, cibersecurity topics and control topics. This work presents an educational project to actively implement an atractive solution for remote access in industrial networks using open-source solutions. The selected open source solutions are the industrial telemetry protocol MQTT in the exchange of access control commands between the involved devices, the openvpn and ssh as a well-known VPN open-source product used for the remote access itself, the NodeRED platform as control dashboard and the IEC62443 industrial cybersecurity standard in order to monitor and audit the effectiveness of the project.