Secure Cloud Manufacturing: Research Challenges and a Case Study

Cloud manufacturing (CM) is an open and service-oriented platform that virtualizes distributed design, manufacturing, and assembling resources together in order to provide a seamless, stable, and high quality transaction of manufacturing procedures. Despite the rich results in resource discovery and matching, the research in robustness and security of the systems falls behind in many aspects. The lack of such knowledge puts a serious challenge for the wide deployment and adoption of cloud manufacturing, which becomes an urgent demand for the sustainability of economy. To bridge this gap, we plan to investigate security of cloud manufacturing. As a specific example, in this paper we will discuss potential vulnerabilities of cloud manufacturing to side channel attacks and design defense mechanisms to balance user privacy and system efficiency. We propose to build a distributed manufacturing cloud prototype upon the RAMP (Remote Automation Management Project) system to form a closed loop evaluation environment. Mutual impacts between the cyber and physical sub-systems will be evaluated. Simulated cyber attacks and incidents on the shop-floor will be injected into the system to assess its security.