Blockchain Suitability Assessment of Manufacturing Functions Defined by the ISA95 Standard

Abstract

The number of security incidents related to the manufacturing industry has been steadily increasing over the past decade. The most prominent security risks impacting the manufacturing industry are intellectual property theft, supply chain interruptions, industrial espionage, data breaches, and ransomware attacks. Blockchain is an emerging technology that offers distributed, highly available, resilient, and traceable ledger-based databases and thus opens new ways of dealing with conventional security challenges in the confidentiality, integrity, and availability domains. ISA95 outlines manufacturing functions in a number of areas and characterizes the information flows. Moreover, ISA95 constitutes a common blueprint for the manufacturing industry and this research paper systematically assesses the suitability of the blockchain technology for the ISA95 enterprise core functions and sub-functions as a way to ultimately increase the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of manufacturing systems.