Because other replies aren't really stating it explicitly, let me add...
The water and power utilities are themselves large distributed systems. They need communications between elements just to function properly. They don't exist in a single location where people can go locally manage them in some air-gapped, offline fashion.
There is no option of not having a communication network to monitor and manage these geographically distributed elements. The question is which communication network you would use, and how you would secure it. Whether it is telephones, radio links, or people running around as messengers, it is still a communications network.
Will some "dedicated" network be any safer? If anything, I imagine the fantasy of a private network will lead to even less security. You cannot physically secure the entire signal path. You really need to treat it as untrusted and build your security on top with encryption, authentication, authorization, etc.
You really need to treat it as untrusted and build your security on top with encryption, authentication, authorization, etc
Infrastructure usually has a long lifetime.
Things become much more vulnerable as time rolls on e.g. we should be worried about AI hacking of smart meter firmware (hard to secure and expensive to upgrade).
Finally, I poked at something that wasn’t connected over USB but WiFi instead, the Elgato Key Light Mini. This one turned out to be way more interesting than I expected: it’s the only one with meaningful firmware integrity protection.
Unfortunately, while that’s an improvement over all of the other devices we’ve looked at, it protects the firmware at exactly one point in time: when an update is happening. It’s not a boot time check enforced by the bootloader or any other kind of secure boot scheme, and the updater happens to be running while everything else in the device is still operating, meaning there’s huge attack surface to try to disable that signature validation. I asked Claude to look for an exploit that might enable this, and it found a doozy
The water and power utilities are themselves large distributed systems.
For power I can understand. For water supply it is harder to understand. Does water supply have similar characteristics to power, for example can you turn on a reservoir when there is an “outage” in another?
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Because other replies aren't really stating it explicitly, let me add...
The water and power utilities are themselves large distributed systems. They need communications between elements just to function properly. They don't exist in a single location where people can go locally manage them in some air-gapped, offline fashion.
There is no option of not having a communication network to monitor and manage these geographically distributed elements. The question is which communication network you would use, and how you would secure it. Whether it is telephones, radio links, or people running around as messengers, it is still a communications network.
Will some "dedicated" network be any safer? If anything, I imagine the fantasy of a private network will lead to even less security. You cannot physically secure the entire signal path. You really need to treat it as untrusted and build your security on top with encryption, authentication, authorization, etc.
Infrastructure usually has a long lifetime.
Things become much more vulnerable as time rolls on e.g. we should be worried about AI hacking of smart meter firmware (hard to secure and expensive to upgrade).
Today's secure system is tomorrow's insecure system. E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49413320 :
For power I can understand. For water supply it is harder to understand. Does water supply have similar characteristics to power, for example can you turn on a reservoir when there is an “outage” in another?
That explains why they are networked, not why internet access is required.
The problem of secure networking has been solved long ago but there is no incentive for OT solution architects to get it right.
In the end real reason is always cost. Connecting straight to internet is extremely cheap. Anything else is somewhat more expensive.