Cryptographic Key Management for SCADA System: An Architectural Framework

SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) security has become a challenging issue today because of its connectivity with the outside world and remote access to the system. One critical security aspect for SCADA systems is that the communication needs to be secured. Several techniques have been proposed for securing the communication channels, but the cryptographic key distribution and key management are still open issues. This paper focuses on the issues and architectural framework of cryptographic key management for SCADA systems. A comparative analysis of suitable architectures for key management of SCADA systems is presented.