Trustworthy data-driven networked production for customer-centric plants

Purpose Industry 4.0 envisions a future of networked production where interconnected machines and business processes running in the cloud will communicate with one another to optimize production and enable more efficient and sustainable individualized/mass manufacturing. However, the openness and process transparency of networked production in hyperconnected manufacturing enterprises pose severe cyber-security threats and information security challenges that need to be dealt with. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach This paper presents a distributed trust model and middleware for collaborative and decentralized access control to guarantee data transparency, integrity, authenticity and authorization of dataflow-oriented Industry 4.0 processes. Findings The results of a performance study indicate that private blockchains are capable of securing IoT-enabled dataflow-oriented networked production processes across the trust boundaries of the Industry 4.0 manufacturing enterprise. Originality/value This paper contributes a decentralized identity and relationship management for users, sensors, actuators, gateways and cloud services to support processes that cross the trust boundaries of the manufacturing enterprise, while offering protection against malicious adversaries gaining unauthorized access to systems, services and information.