SCADA Security

Derived from Iotellect, Iotellect SCADA/HMI inherits its powerful and flexible role-based security model. System operators have separate user accounts. These accounts may own resources (device accounts, HMIs (dashboards), alerts, reports, event filters). However, the system allows to share resource view/edit permissions between different accounts. See Security and Permissions for more information.

Some SCADA systems associate permission levels and checks with every component of HMI interfaces. Iotellect SCADA/HMI uses a smarter method of controlling what a certain HMI (dashboard) can and cannot do:

• Dashboard components have no security-related information associated with them

• The working dashboard inherits the permissions of the user who launched it

• Every read or write request to the server data model uses the same effective permission level (i.e. permissions of the user that started the HMI dashboard)

• Permissions are checked on the server side, therefore compromising security by "hacking" the client-side dashboard is not possible

• Fine-grained permission control is performed by giving system operators different levels of access to different system resources and devices

A Iotellect SCADA/HMI tag configured for writing carries values through to the device account behind it. Iotellect SCADA/HMI itself performs that write, not the user who wrote the tag, so the permissions of that user on the device account never come into play. Write access to the Digital Twin variable that stores the tag value is enough to reach the equipment.

Access to such tags is therefore governed by the permissions of the Digital Twin that owns them, in the same way as access to any other context and its variables. Plan operator roles accordingly.

Granting a user write access to a tag configured for writing gives that user control over the equipment behind it, even when the user has no permissions on the device account that receives the value.

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