Madtls: Fine-grained Middlebox-aware End-to-end Security for Industrial Communication

Industrial control systems increasingly rely on middlebox functionality such as intrusion detection or in-network processing. However, traditional end-to-end security protocols interfere with the necessary access to in-flight data. While recent work on middlebox-aware end-to-end security protocols for the traditional Internet promises to address the dilemma between end-to-end security guarantees and middleboxes, the current state-of-the-art lacks critical features for industrial communication. Most importantly, industrial settings require fine-grained access control for middleboxes to truly operate in a least-privilege mode. Likewise, advanced applications even require that middleboxes can inject specific messages (e.g., emergency shutdowns). Meanwhile, industrial scenarios often expose tight latency and bandwidth constraints not found in the traditional Internet. As the current state-of-the-art misses critical features, we propose Middlebox-aware DTLS (Madtls), a middlebox-aware end-to-end security protocol specifically tailored to the needs of industrial networks. Madtls provides bit-level read and write access control of middleboxes to communicated data with minimal bandwidth and processing overhead, even on constrained hardware.