Development and Research of a Hardware Security Module to Control and Protect Access to Industrial Equipment

The development of a test version of the Hardware Security Module (HSM), presented in this article, solves the tasks of cyber protection of individual uncontrolled sections of the field-level communication network (RS-485, RS422) that are physically accessible to intruders. A cyber threat called man-in-the-middle (MiTM) attack occurs for unprotected network segments. The attack is aimed at violating access control, confidentiality and integrity of the sender’s data on the network, which can lead to the replacement of malicious data and the failure of industrial equipment. A printed circuit board in form factor PC/104 was developed for testing the HSM_DNS module. The Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is selected as the control hardware platform. The choice of FPGA is justified by the need for HSM to work in real time, encoding the transmitted data according to the developed algorithm. In addition, the use of FPGA makes it possible to implement a non-standard data transfer protocol, which increases the security of the device. The article presents the results of the tests and their discussion.