Wireless pt 3

In the third and last episode of the Wireless Series, Simon addresses  concerns around industrial wireless solutions: security, interference, reliability and interoperability.

Transcript

 Sean   00:11 

Welcome back to Yokogawa Debunks, conversation with industry experts aiming to debunk the myths and misconceptions we hear in process, instrumentation and industrial automation. And welcome back to our third episode of our wireless series. There've been so many myths about industrial wireless that we've had to split them over a number of episodes. But once again, I'm pleased to be joined by Yokogawa Simon Lillie to discuss the last of the major myths around wireless. So greetings once again, Simon. Thank you very much for coming back. 

Simon   00:40 

No worries. Glad to be back. And talking about these major issues surrounding wireless. With our discussions over this series, I'm sure we're going to put people's minds at ease and cover all these major myths and concerns that people have had. 

Sean   00:54 

Thanks Simon and now I think we've seen that industrial wireless is a very interesting topic, but there are so many myths surrounding it. Do you personally believe that these myths are holding people back from adopting the technology at their sites? 

Simon 01:05 

Well, that's a good statement, and from my experience, I'll definitely say yes, that's correct. Human beings traditionally resist change and generally being hesitant to take on newer technologies. We try to be risk-averse and we often fall into the trend of not-me-first type of things. And I've seen this be the case with industry wireless. There's been so many myths that concern people and it's been holding them back from delving into the technology. But unfortunately, that's also been holding them back from getting the solutions and the savings that wireless can offer them in terms of project delivery time and significant cost savings. 

I've seen a number of people interested in wireless, but they've just held themselves back from embracing that technology while they've been concerned about all the myths as they've watched and waited for others to dive in first. 

Sean   01:52 

So what do you think has been the biggest issue that's actually holding people back? 

Simon 01:56 

By far, I'd say the biggest item or biggest issue that's been holding back people is the various concerns related to security. 

Sean 02:05 

Now, that's unsurprising because security of systems and data is more and more vital. You know, is there any truth to the myths around industrial wireless being a security issue to the plant? I mean, for example, can hackers just go into a wireless device and into the whole network and shut down a site, for example? 

Simon  02:23 

Well, happily, no, they can't. That's definitely a myth. Industrial Wireless doesn't pose a security issue on a plant. It's completely safe and secure. And until you really understand all the security that's involved in industrial wireless, it's justifiable to be concerned. Many of us have had past bad experiences with home or work wireless networks, and they are in front of our minds when we're looking at losing wireless in the industrial world. People are worried about things like corruption of data, blockage of transmissions, rogue devices getting onto a network. 

But all these are mitigated by the very strong security which has been built in the ISA100 wireless standard, as we've discussed previously, ISA100 wireless was designed for the industrial world. So as part of that, security was a key part of the development of this standard. 

Sean  03:11 

So with regards to the general security concerns, I mean, what other concerns people have? I mean, what is it specifically that they're worried about? 

Simon  03:19 

The main one people seem to be most concerned about is corruption of their data. So, for an example, say we had a wireless device on a tank level application. If somebody was able to gain access into your network and manipulate the data, they could tell the control system something different than what your transmitter was actually measuring and people are concerned with. As in a wired system, you need to physically get into the wired network to do any manipulation. 

But when the data is transmitted over the air, it seems like it's less secure. So say the transmitter is measuring 100 percent level in the tank. But if you are able to get in there and corrupt and manipulate that data, while it's being wirelessly transmitted, you could tell the control system that the tank is only 10 percent full, the control system then will activate all the pumps to try and fill the tank, which will expose you to overfilling the tank, which could have great economic and even potentially environmental impacts. 

Simon   04:14 

But of course, this can't happen due to the high security in wireless. But until people understand the security and that that can't happen, it is a big concern to them. 

Another concern that people have is neighboring plants and having wireless devices on multiple plants and possibly cross-talk or sending data across networks. So if you had another plant next door, how do you stop their devices talking to your system or corrupting the data or the transmissions on your side? 

But once again, due to the high security in ISA100, this can't happen. 

Sean   04:48 

Look, I mean, data is increasingly important to industrial applications, so you can certainly see the concerns there. 

Simon  04:53 

Yes, data is definitely vital to plant operations, you must be able to trust your data and to trust your data, you must be able to trust the instrument and also trust the way it's being communicated back. 

Sean 05:06 

So looking specifically at the ISA100 wireless standard, I mean, how does it alleviate some of these issues on the security? And, you know, you mentioned that security is very strong, but can you actually give it a little bit more detail to that? 

Simon 05:19 

No worries. ISA100 is both robust and completely secure. So to prevent things like corruption and manipulation of data, the ISA100 standard employees advanced encryption standard 128 bit security. So you may not be a security expert to understand exactly what that is, but it's a very, very high level of encryption and this level of encryption is almost impossible to break. 

Sean 05:44 

I'm certainly not a security expert. So maybe you can tell me a little bit more about the type of encryption that's used. 

Simon 05:50 

Yes, so 128 bit encryption, as I said, is almost impossible to break. To give you an idea of how secure it is, the US government uses this level of encryption for their classified information up to a secret level. And we all know how much they like keeping their secrets safe. But a 128 bit key involves ten rounds of encryption using one hundred and twenty eight bit blocks of data. and the number of steps needed to crack and AES one twenty eight key is an eight followed by 37 zeros. 

So to put this into a little bit more of a perspective for us all, if we had a trillion machines testing a billion keys per second, it would still take more than two billion years to recover a key from an AES one twenty eight system. So it would take around 38 trillion terabytes of data, which is currently more than all the data stored on all the computers on the planet. So if you take a look at that, there's no way you're going to crack this security. 

Sean 06:45 

I mean, quite a deep level of encryption there. But what about one of the other issues around people putting unwanted devices on a network, you know, is this going to be possible? 

Simon 06:56 

Now, that's not possible either due to the way devices have to join the network. On an ISA one hundred wireless network you have to pass a specific join key to the security manager on the network before a device can join the network. And this join key is fully encrypted itself and uses a challenge response process. So based on this, no one is going to be able to put a rogue device on your network because it won't have the right security join key to be able to get onto the system. If they tried to put a device on the network like a power the wireless transmitter on. But your wireless network completely ignore it because it wouldn't be passing through the correct join key. 

Sean 07:31 

Now, I am aware that an ISA100.11a operates on the 2.4 gigahertz frequency. And I'm also aware that this is a fairly common frequency for other wireless devices out there in use. So do you see this as posing an issue to those who are looking at employing industrial wireless on their plant? 

Simon 07:51 

Well, while ISA100 does operate on the 2.4 gigahertz frequency, It also employs many technologies to minimize plant interference. So these include things like frequency hopping and very short message times to minimize collisions of data. Frequency hopping means that if for some reason a signal cannot pass through the network, the network can hop to a different frequency to get around the interference and make sure that data gets through. So while we say ISA100 is on 2.4 gigahertz, it actually uses 15 frequency channels across a wider band. 

And also featured in part of the standard is channel blacklisting and direct sequence spectrum technologies. So ISA100 was designed from the ground up for use in the industrial world and it's robust and rugged and can be completely safe and secure in your communications. 

Sean  08:42 

Now it's good to clarify because it gives that surety about putting these devices on the plant. Now, I know we've already discussed security and we've discussed interference, but I'm also thinking here a little bit about reliability. So if we're going to use industrial wireless for critical plant applications, for example, it must be reliable. Now, how is reliability insured in the networks? 

Simon 08:59 

Where you’re pulling out some really good questions this time. This is another top concern that users have been having as they've been looking into industrial wireless and reliability can come in a number of forms. 

Firstly, we can increase the reliability of our wireless network by employing a mesh topology if we need to. So with ISA hundred wireless, unlike some of the other standards, we can use a network as a star mesh or hybrid, giving great flexibility. With a mesh network or a hybrid network, we can have a secondary or a backup pathway for the communication back to the gateway. So while we have a primary and secondary path, we can increase the reliability of our wireless communications. 

We can see on the operating system through our management station all that wireless communication paths. We can see their signal strengths and we can see the pack of error rates on each of the channels as well. So we can monitor the system over time. And this is very handy, as if things change on site like things like new scaffolding and new building we can quickly and easily check the impact on our wireless network and make sure that it’s keeping its reliability. 

Simon 10:09 

Another reliability feature built into ISA-100 is a function called duo-cast, and this feature means we can have redundancy in our wireless access points, so now we can have a primary and a backup access point, ensuring the data from the field always makes it back up to the gateway system. To further increase reliability we can have hot spot functionality in our wireless management station level. In this sort of system we have two wireless management stations connected together. If the master system went down for any reason, the backup can pick up the network in 1 second, after the master station went offline, hence further increasing the reliability. We can then look for reliability in things like building redundancy into the higher level systems through things like switches and control system inputs. So a wireless system can be as simple or as advanced as required for all the applications you’re looking to cover. Obviously if you’re only using wireless for simple monitoring applications, you don’t need to go to these great lengths. But if you’re looking to use wireless for critical applications or control, then reliability and redundancy becomes much more important and you can do that today;  

Sean 11:17 

Ok Simon, you convinced me that wireless is a robust and reliable technology but what if I buy a wireless network from one supplier? Am I then locked into purchasing all my devices from that supplier or is it flexible enough to be able to buy from multiple vendors? 

Simon 11:35 

Another good question and something that people are very interested in, and it’s a feature of ISA100 that it is interoperable. So that means that you can get a field wireless device from any manufacturer and it will communicate with a field device from any other device manufacturer. But it also means that any manufacturers field device will convert to any wireless gateway that’s out there from any brand so that gives the users the flexibility to use any brand field device and any brand management station that they’d like. So you’re definitely not locked to a single source supplier. It’s also good not only from the end users point of view but from the suppliers point of view because it means that a supplier doesn’t have to develop solutions for each and every application. A supplier can focus on the applications that they have the best expertise in and leave the other applications to other suppliers. So really works for suppliers and the end user. 

Sean 12:27 

Now, I don’t wanna sound skeptical here and the interoperability sounds great but I’ve seen this fall apart in the real world in the past. So how does the ISA100 standard ensure that we don’t repeat the story that other protocols have encountered in the past? 

Simon  12:43 

Can definitely understand you’re concern there and interoperability is an important issue and it is assured by a testing and registration process. So there’s an independent body, the ISA100 wireless compliance institute which does all the independent interoperability testing. So a manufacturer or supplier will send their device to the institute. They’ll do all the tests and if the device passes it’ll get issued with an interoperability certificate. It’s really important to note here that the institute is independent, it’s not run or controlled by any of the ISA100 suppliers. You can get copies of the certificates from the wireless instrument supplier or from the compliance website. And once you’ve got that interoperability certificate you can be assured that the device has been tested and it’s fully interoperable. 

Sean 13:29 

OK Thanks simon. I think we’ve pretty much killed most of the myths around these three episodes around wireless and we’re hoping that our listening audience today is clear that all the characteristics that we got here of reliability, interoperability, an importantly security have been addressed. Now with the issues you covered here and in our previous episodes hopefully everybody is going to be a little bit more comfortable with industrial wireless networks and they can actually see that it is a really great and a really advantageous technology. 

Simon  13:59 

Well thank you very much for having me along in these episodes. I hope that I’ve conveyed to everyone that industrial wireless is completely safe, secure, and robust, and most importantly provides many different solutions to all the issues that people are facing out there. Wireless can help bring about savings in project development time, savings in project costs, and it could be definitely be something you should be considering for your future projects. If you got any more concerns or any questions, please reach out to us and we can provide with further information or we can show you our full solution portfolio which can handle all the different issues you might be facing. 

Sean 14: 36 

OK thanks once again Simon and thank you for listening. And we look forward for you to join us in our next chat in the Yokogawa Debunks series. Until next time. Goodbye.