A simple security architecture for smart water management system

Abstract

Water scarcity and water stress issues have become clear threat to the global population. This makes water management a critical aspect to ensure sustainable water. An efficient water management system requires thousands of constraint devices (sensors and/or actuators) to be deployed across the water distribution network to enable near-real time monitoring and control of the water grid components. Security at both the device and network level is critical to the operation of such a system. Although several IT security controls have developed over the past few decades, they cannot be used directly with such constraint devices. This is due to their limited resources and unique requirements. However, some of these techniques can be adapted and used with these constraint devices. In this paper, we propose security architecture for smart water management systems, the architecture leverages existing security solutions and design patterns.