Vulnerable industrial controls directly connected to Internet

Re:Vulnerable industrial controls directly connected to Inte... by taneq on Monday January 29, 2018 @05:19AM (#16256604)

I hear ya. The issue, though, is that the end product has to be at least readable, if not maintainable, by any half competent electrician, so lowest common denominator (ie. usually ladder logic) is as abstract as you can go. Also for most industrial controls, the system is "wide" rather than "deep", in the sense that almost everything is pretty trivial ('read inputs X and Y, set output Z if X and not Y') but there are thousands of X and Y. And finally, X etc. are tied so intimately with the hardware, which by the time the site is actually built and all the vendor packages integrated is only loosely related to the original design. So while I absolutely agree that it could be improved on significantly, the end result will still look (on the surface) quite like what we have now.

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Re:Vulnerable industrial controls directly connected to Inte... by marcosdumay on Monday January 29, 2018 @09:50AM (#16257775)

> the end product has to be at least readable, if not maintainable, by any half competent electrician

You can get that by using Python or similar languages; you can get that by programming in something like a Haskell DSL and hiding the underlining libraries; you can get that by creating an actual DSL and interpreting it on the fly.

But C or C++ state machines manually encoded into structured code is one of the things that won't get you there.

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Re:Vulnerable industrial controls directly connected to Inte... by taneq on Monday January 29, 2018 @07:39PM (#16261953)

Absolutely not. Most industrial automation engineers, let alone electricians, are unable to handle Structured Text (the standard IEC text-based programming language for PLCs), let alone Python. Haskell is not even on the same planet.

And a DSL is the exact opposite of what we're trying to accomplish: An electrician with no prior knowledge of the system needs to be able to read the code and understand which switches and sensors need to be turned on in order for that motor over there to start. Having to learn an entire new custom language at 3AM when you're losing $700,000 an hour in lost production is not an option.

(Edit: I should clarify that I'm talking about mining here. High end factory automation engineers may very well be more familiar with 'traditional' languages.)

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Re:Vulnerable industrial controls directly connected to Inte... by snowwindwaves on Monday January 29, 2018 @02:02PM (#16259788)

The people I've worked with who are operating power plants can't read code. Perhaps they can read a schematic and could understand ladder logic. They are usually quite skilled mechanically though.

Even the automation professionals I work with whose jobs are to write and maintain PLC programs look at the 'structured text' PLC logic I've written (a constraint solving algorithm) and can't be bothered trying to understand it.

Controlling a physical system is different from programming computers. The simpler the logic is to read and understand the better. Direct and verbose is better than layers of indirection and abstractions.

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Re:Vulnerable industrial controls directly connected to Inte... by WillReplyfFood on Monday January 29, 2018 @06:53AM (#16256937)

The systems where wide, and not deep. But by now they want industry 4.0 - means they want intelligent behaving machines. As in - material flow on fail rerouting, process controlling and self-adjusting, as in self checking for upcoming flaws. All parts are tracked over network, all guides to the machine have to be electronic.

And they want this with the conditions you described.

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Re:Vulnerable industrial controls directly connected to Inte... by taneq on Monday January 29, 2018 @07:41PM (#16261969)

Is this in factory automation? I work in mining and everything is still very simple there, nothing more complex than a PID controller or speed ramps on some variable speed drives. I wish we could do some more advanced tuning, but the key criteria for anything we do is reliability, robustness (even in the face of sensor failures, everything is monitored and has manual overrides) and simplicity.

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