OT AND MANUFACTURING
Out of the plant network, without a USB stick
Operator stations, engineering workstations and historian clients are kept off the corporate network for good reasons. Their logs, batch reports, alarm exports and recipes still have to leave — and in many plants they leave on a USB stick, the route most security programmes are trying to close.
Written by Taha Bayar, who builds Kionel. Kionel is one of the options below; the comparison is meant to be usable even if you choose another.
What Kionel does on the plant floor
- No media, no network, no agent. The station shows the file as a stream of codes in a browser; a phone or tablet films it. Nothing is plugged in and nothing is installed on the station.
- Integrity you can show. The file is encrypted to the receiving device, its SHA-256 is signed by the sending station together with the work order or change ticket, and the receiver signs that it arrived intact.
- A record per transfer. Dispatch and delivery records, a printable report, and a local hash-chained log make each movement auditable.
- Proof without the file. Where the data must not leave at all, the station can seal a file — hash, size, time, ticket — and only the small signed seal goes out.
Unattended: a folder that sends itself
For logs and reports that appear all day, nobody should have to stand at the station. The station watches a folder and sends every new or changed file over a one-way serial cable: encrypted to the receiving computer's card, signed with the change ticket, and written with its receipt into a folder on the other side, where a historian or SIEM can pick it up. With the return wire left out, nothing can reach the station.
It is a file link, not a network bridge: files, not protocols; up to about 80 KB/s; and because nothing comes back, a file sent while the receiver was off is not resent on its own. The sending station's log lists what was sent, and starting again with Also send the files that are already in the folder fills a gap.
Direction matters — read this first
| Direction | Fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Out of the plant (logs, reports, recipes, alarm exports) | Good | The station only needs a screen; the phone outside does the reading. |
| Into the plant (patches, firmware, new recipes) | With a camera on the target, or a serial cable turned round | By screen, the receiving machine must see the sending screen, and most HMIs have no camera. A one-way serial cable wired the other way carries files in with nothing able to come out. |
| A steady flow (logs, alarm exports, reports all day) | Good, over a serial cable | The station watches a folder and sends each new file unattended; the receiver saves each one with its receipt. |
| Large files (historian archives, full backups, images) | Wrong tool | Tens of kilobytes per second by screen, up to about 80 KB/s by cable. Use a data diode or a controlled network conduit. |
Compared with the usual routes
| Controlled USB + kiosk | Data diode | Kionel | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Physical media in the zone | Yes | No | No |
| Installation | Kiosk, procedure | Hardware, network change | A browser |
| Signed record per file | Depends on logs | Depends on software around it | Built in |
| Throughput | High | High | Small files |
| Continuous one-way flow | No | Yes, any protocol it supports | Files, over a serial cable |
| Typical cost | Kiosk in the tens of thousands of dollars | From thousands to well over $100,000 per link, plus installation | Annual licence per site; continuous links priced per link, ask us |
Kionel has not had an independent security audit yet; its protocols are modelled and machine-checked, with results on the security page. It does not inspect file content for malware.
Try it on one station
Kionel is free and open source, so you can see it work on a real station, signed records included, before anyone commits to anything.