Security strategies for field area networks

With the interconnection of factory communication networks and the Internet the long-neglected security aspects of such systems gain increasing importance. This mainly has to be attributed to the awareness to security issues on the Internet that has grown in recent years. While many security practices found in the Internet environment are applicable to the field of factory communication new challenges arise most evidently seen in the often more stringent real-time requirements and the deployment of such systems in environments that are not under the control of the owner, as is the case in remote meter reading.