Open AccessLIGHT WEIGHT SECURITY FOR OPC UA BASED ARCHITECTURE
Author(s) -
Varun Shivaprasad,
H. D. Kallinatha
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
international journal of communication networks and security
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2231-1882
DOI - 10.47893/ijcns.2013.1067
Subject(s) - computer science , handshake , transport layer security , computer network , key (lock) , data sharing , overhead (engineering) , computer security , operating system , encryption , medicine , alternative medicine , pathology
The open platform communication (OPC) is becoming the universal standard for platform independent data sharing and data access. The OPC standard defines communication standards to be followed for data integration in the automation industry. The OPC communication facilitates a language independent way of communication and by using this, all devices can communicate with a centralized or a distributed server in the network. The server will provide clients with facilities such as data monitoring, access and to change values in the devices in the network. The OPC UA provides security add-ons such as security in the transport layer which is mainly the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). But the SSL adds more load on the security as it involves handshake/key-distribution which consists of a costly public key cryptography. This also puts more load on the server to store and maintain multiple keys involving multiple clients. We believe that a if a framework based on shared key is used, which will be persistent for the whole time duration of the relationship, the communication overhead can be reduced in remote access. This helps in reducing the response time of the already time critical OPC UA based architectures which requires devices to work in real time and put as much less load as possible on the server.