The future of wireless robot security - By N.L. Belardes

As I embark into my latest novel that incorporates futuristic automation issues regarding robots, I can't help but study the world of wireless robotics. You remember the first robots don't you? The first remote control anything was attached with wires. You had a little box with knobs and it was attached to a car, train, robot and you got it all tangled.

Many robotics in factories are industrial automation pneumatics hooked up with cables to control systems; robot arms that can do a hundred mundane and semi-complex factory tasks. That's a far cry from the beginning of remote control. And factories are going more wireless all the time. That's where the world is headed: Data packets over the air.

So that means not all robotics are wireless. But are robots?

I think so. And independent thinkers too. Here's a definition of robot from the Yahoo.com dictionary:

1. A mechanical device that sometimes resembles a human and is capable of performing a variety of often complex human tasks on command or by being programmed in advance.
2. A machine or device that operates automatically or by remote control.
3. A person who works mechanically without original thought, especially one who responds automatically to the commands of others.

You can see, wireless is practically built in to the very definition of robot. Not exactly, but in an either/or fashion. A robot might not transmit data wirelessly. A robot may work independent of long cables but have to physically perform tasks like turning on lights with its own robotic arm rather than via wireless commands.

Which would be the most effectively automated robot to serve your needs? You have to ask?

A robot that could do both.

Seems kind of scary. You can't blink and turn lights on and off. But your robot could. You can't use thought-control on your high definition television set to change the channel to Monday Night Football. But your robot could seem to do that, and take your coat... and its eyes could flash like a strobe and lock your doors and cupboards.

And then, what if someone hacked your robot?

You would have to literally re-hack into your robot (or kill it - kill? terminate? shut down?) or you would be locked in your home forever like the Cask of Amontillado; locked in your sweet little home and starving to death because your robot won't let you into your refrigerator...

Real-time data security. I hope you believe in a secure future.

A phone conversation with Walt Boyes - By N.L. Belardes

I talked to Walt Boyes on the phone today. I thought he wasn't going to write back, so I just dialed him up in Chicago, not knowing if he was unreachable or not.

He was reachable. In fact, he informed me that he sent me an email that I never received. The unfortunate reality of firewalls and crazy email systems is just weird sometimes. We had a good conversation. He agreed that the podcast could have more singing and dancing, and that he does indeed write fiction. "I've had a short story published and I'm on a board with a Science Fiction journal." I found a link on his personal homepage.

I told him about my making Jim Pinto a character in my latest work. "Oh do you know about Tuckerization and red-shirting?" he said. "There's two ways you can write about people. Remember all those guys on the enterprise on the away missions that wore the red shirts?"

"Oh yeah, they always died."

"Exactly. You can write about them that way. Or Tuckerization; Tucker was an author who always wrote people he knew into stories to memorialize them..."

I'm thinking the Tuckerization method would work in this case. I do plenty of red-shirting in my other works.

"You need to talk to Frank Williams over there at Ecco. He's with your competition. He knows Pinto real well."

I was thinking just get to know Pinto myself. I mean, why not? I'm not making him into a mad scientist. No red-shirting, I swear... But I think I will track down Frank Williams just for the fun of it... the goose chase is on...

Walt Boyes is a cool cat. He's a former Bananaslug from Santa Cruz and was great fun to talk to... we talked podcasts, blogs, fiction and plan on talking more after the first of the year...

Who is Walt Boyes? - By N.L. Belardes

I'm hot on the trail of Walt Boyes. Do you know who he is? He's a fiction writer, but more importantly, Editor in Chief for Control Magazine, one of the most avant-garde industrial automation trade journals on the market (I have to say my favorite cover was the July 2004 edition with the plastic green army men set up in heroic defense poses for critical control systems; reminded me of my wayward childhood and such toys).

Now, I've never spoken to Walt, but I regularly read his columns in Control and just began reading his blog on LiveJournal as well as his blogs on controlglobal.com, and even just checked out his first podcast (MP3 download) for ControlGlobal.com, "An Interview with Matrikon's Mike Brown."

Podcasting is a wide open market. Although I write two automation industry blogs, I do a podcast in a completely different realm: music and the arts in Bakersfield, California (Buck City Podcast). Let me tell you, I've been yelled at by music scene folks for not having top-rated sound, up-to-date commercials, and more. But I'm growing... Bakersfield's Buck City Podcast is going through massive changes that will include promo spots for Buck City and other podcasts, better sound, and greater portability. Being in the field is key...

My qualms with Walt Boyes ControlGlobal podcast are the same gripes folks have had with mine that I am still overcoming to make a better show that keeps folks attention: There's no "go get 'em boys" music intro or commercial breaks. The editing could have been done a little crisper... and sound levels could have been more evened out...

Folks are used to radio. They need small segments and a flowing show that has short breaks and the nuances unique to the realm of audio shows. That doesn't mean Boyes' podcast was poor. OK, it wasn't kicking me in the pants. But it has potential! The information was there. Mike Brown is an interesting conversationalist and Walt carefully planned out his questions in talking about business goals in real-time process management, changed management perspectives with work processes that fit specific automation plants, the challenge of performance improvement, and more...

ControlGlobal can really corner the market in industrial automation podcasts, but only if they move fast and gain high rankings before the field gets saturated. I sent Walt Boyes a letter to see if he will respond to some of my creative suggestions...

Who knows, maybe he will even talk science fiction with me...

Pinto's Points, robotics, and more... - By N.L. Belardes

I started reading Jim Pinto's new book, Pinto's Points just last week. I ordered both of his books, the other one being Automation Unplugged. I'll be writing a review here on Portable Protocol in the coming days, just as soon as I finish my reading. I have to admit I'm trying to get through a novel on mercenaries in South Africa as well. As well as my other blogs I also started work on a novel that discusses some futurist thoughts of my own in the realm of automation, robotics and how I envision automation networks in the homefront. I should add that it's a literary/sci-fi novel/comedy-drama that I'm beginning to think a character based on Jim Pinto (I've never met him) might be a lot of fun. I'll keep you posted...

While you're out perusing blogs, Gary Mintchell wrote an interesting piece on machine-to-machine market potential... a dwindling communications area using cell phone technology for M2M communications. I have to agree. As wireless communications take over, the cell market will dwindle more and more into its own niche, possibly becoming obsolete before we can even blink...

No More hackers! A note on wireless security for the factory floor - By N.L. Belardes

I have been hearing talk lately about raising the standard in wireless security awareness for networks on the factory floor and in hard-to-reach remote locations. Why? I work in the industrial automation sector for a company that develops protocol gateways, protocol converters and wireless products. Wireless is the new buzz and security is always the big issue. As a topic, industrial wireless security is just hitting the factory floor and I can say through my research, is an interesting tour through the Internet and the world of white papers out there on the matter.

Most of the talk I hear is that most potential industrial wireless hazards would come from 'inside jobs', hackers who are disgruntled workers that might make a messy world of a wireless network because they already know passwords and integral rogue access points. The idea of a hacker who is not an 'inside man' actually breaking in, taking control, and causing catastrophic problems to an industrial wireless network is unlikely at best. You never hear in the news of some guy parking his motor scooter next to a factory wall with a laptop and Pringles can antenna, hacking data and taking control, then making end devices go bonkers and build backwards widgets because of jumping in through an all-too-open access point with easily interpreted data. The idea is feasible. The reality is just not there...

Yes, the recent Rockwell security paper would have us all thinking that factory devices could get belligerent, spill toxic goo, blow up resources, and make all connections go haywire because of the invading hacker elite. Rockwell points to the Australian case of the Wastewater plant where in an inside job by a disgruntled employee, he caused wastewater to fill up more than just a lonely tin can down under. Look at the facts: that is just what the industrial wireless attack was, an inside job. Sure, anyone with multiple passwords (who likely built the network), and who is supposedly trusted can potentially lay waste to a wireless or cable-built network.

Is that really the reality of hacking data from a deviant passersby? No, this is not the corporate world where hotspots fill the New York air and Johnny with his computer can leave 40 people dirty messages on their desktop because they set their wireless security settings to 'default'.

Awareness, however, needs to be raised for the factory as well. The fact that data is in the air because of the nature of the wireless beast makes folks think data is up for grabs. But is it? Not if plant floor folks take heed of basic security techniques.

Recently, Wallace Gastreich in his white paper, "Wireless Security on the Plant Floor" wrote about better ways to set up antenna arrays, how to better monitor access points, the do's and don'ts of authentication keys and key-rollover techniques, and in his research pointed out the possibility of a hacker stealing data from the factory floor and what they could do with such data. Gastreich writes regarding Frequency Hopping technology:

It is virtually impossible for a would-be intruder to access raw or encrypted data from FHSS devices. These industrial wireless modems provide the highest level of security...

Why? One reason is that if the hacker with the pringle can were to actually spend three days figuring out the authentication codes through a rogue access point then would he be able to interpret proprietary data?

Not likely, according to Gastreich. "Who is going to be able to interpret a bunch of ones and zeros?" he said in a recent interview. "In a properly secured factory, hackers just aren't going to access data in the air that says, 'I am such-and-such device and this is my information'. The data is proprietary in many cases and would have to be an inside job for access to how to interpret the data."

So what about the inside job?

One case is all I could find other than a land-based viral worm attack on a Nuke plant in Ohio; I could find nothing. Maybe all inside guys with the passwords should be trusted... Maybe they should be watched like hawks. Oh heck, just feed them well, will you?

I asked Gary Mintchell of Automation World and Feed Forward what he might have heard in the buzz on wireless security. He wrote:

Interestingly enough, I hear almost nothing about wireless security other than the usual WiFi type security. It is something that the ISA SP-100 committee is considering, but they are not very far along. I have a writer researching the area. We'll see what he comes up with.

Good luck. His writers have excellent access to the world of automation, but I just don't think there's going to be much out there in the realm of wireless security fears turned real scenarios in the industrial world of automation networks. Well, there is always the fear, but awareness, diligence, rotating authentication keys, minimal networks, a distance from corporate networks, smaller bubbles in wireless points of access, and using products that have the best security built in...

Just watch the guys in-house with the passwords, and when they are canned, change passwords and man the firewalls...

-N.L. Belardes

Abstract thoughts on data-mining and historians in today’s world of automation - By N.L. Belardes

The data-miners of the Industrial Automation world aren't like those in the realm of graduate school history I was used to when studying the philosophies of R.G. Collingwood in his book the Idea of History. He talked about history as a redundancy, being "everything in the past that has happened".

Sure, there are products called historian, but a true historian of the philosophy of history analyzes and interprets the past through a unique prism of perspective. They look at an entire world of historical data, and gather to some degree, then regurgitate the past in analyzed form…

In the world of industrial automation a historian is a device that records data in an event sequence in the form of numbers and dates—it's all very sequential, and it's people-free. Well, not entirely.

No, this is a new era of data-mining, where information is stored for product analysis and more. Folks in a wide range of industries simply must gather and store data. Sure, at one time humankind had to send humans to gather data: electricity meter readers, weathermen on mountaintops, tides and current cycles, water and gas levels taken with big yardsticks, and so on through individual observance and data recording… and it's still done. Yet companies are constantly thinking up new ways to automate data-gathering.

So much for the human element. Let's face it, humans in their propensity to wonder just aren't as efficient as machines and data collectors. Frederick Taylor may have studied scientific management and efficiency to no end. He may have turned cutting metal into a workday science, but he left out one important aspect of studying human efficiency in a factory setting: automation. Pure efficiency comes from the machines often making the products and the machines often gathering data regarding those machines, or about the choices we humans make on a daily basis.

And why not record the data of the choices we make day to day? New products will be developed just for our tastes.

Data-mining comes from a wide range of companies: OSIsoft, Wonderware, ProSoft Technology, RSBizware for Rockwell, Siemens, GE, all using computer technology and servers in packaging, manufacturing, oil and gas and power industries; and often using data-gathering programs built into little computers fit into modules or stand-alone technology that simply collects data in real-time, archives and stores in servers for later quantitative analysis.

Data-mining in the automation world is a sea of technology.

Makes you wonder how when population grow and automation grows, where the people are all going to work. Surely they can't all be competing for that job of analyzing all the data mined…

-N.L. Belardes

Industrial Automation on the Internet - By N.L. Belardes

If you think the world of the Internet is just about you poking your fingers at the keyboard, think again. Cyberspace is something for the machines these days. Devices in every factory on the planet are connected to through specific protocol languages, and many of those accessed and driven via the Internet. Protocol languages, you know are sent via data highways, gathered, and analyzed often through the Internet and it is growing daily.

Connectivity means often monitoring machines via Web portals. You thought talking to your jilted lover in a chat room, reading blogs, surfing news and shopping on Amazon.com was the latest and greatest available online?

No way.

Read on in this Pakistan paper... machines on the Net are being talked about all over the world. You can find links in American, European papers and more... I just wish the article talked more about factory automation and automation robotics...

I asked Richard Theron, marketing manager where I have my day job over at ProSoft Technology about what he thought were the most popular automation industry protocols accessed via the Web.

"The Internet is growing by leaps and bounds. I can't believe how many factory devices are accessed through the Net all over the world. This is not a new trend, but a new way of machine existence. Be sure to note that on the device level Modbus still has global dominance. In Europe, PROFIBUS has an incredible level of installation. But it really also depends on niche markets, vertical markets, and choices made by individual factories on what industrial protocols they may favor..."

I don't think we have to worry about Terminator just yet growing out of the Internet and taking us over. There's still plenty of room for you to keep talking to your cyber friends in who knows where, or on your favorite multi-player death match game...

Yet, beware as industrial automation machines on the Web are on the rise!

-N.L. Belardes