Industrial control systems power critical infrastructure worldwide—water treatment, power grids, manufacturing. Yet they face unprecedented cyber threats from nation-state actors and opportunistic attackers. The IEC 62443 standard establishes comprehensive security principles for industrial automation and control systems.
Part of the Critical Systems Analysis functional-safety series on Industrial Cybersecurity.
In this episode:
- IEC 62443 is the international standard for industrial automation and control systems security.
- The standard mandates that security be integrated from the start, not bolted on afterward.
- Each S-D-L-C phase requires specific security activities: threat modeling in design, secure coding in development, security testing before release, and continuous monitoring after deployment.
- Not all documents need identical protection levels.
- IEC 62443 requires systematic risk assessment at each lifecycle stage, rating threats by likelihood and impact.
- IEC 62443 Part 4-one defines mandatory secure coding practices: peer code review before release, static analysis and vulnerability scanning, patch tracking, and protection of development tools.
Reference: IEC 62443-4-2:2019 Clause 6.3.3 specifies technical security measures for components, including documented SDLC requirements
More in this series: IEC 62443 — Industrial Cybersecurity
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