Addressing Security Challenges in Industrial Augmented Reality Systems

In context of Industry 4.0 Augmented Reality (AR) is frequently mentioned as the upcoming interface technology for human-machine communication and collaboration. Many prototypes have already arisen in both the consumer market and in the industrial sector. According to numerous experts it will take only few years until AR will reach the maturity level to be deployed in productive applications. Especially for industrial usage it is required to assess security risks and challenges this new technology implicates. Thereby we focus on plant operators, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and component vendors as stakeholders. Starting from several industrial AR use cases and the structure of contemporary AR applications, in this paper we identify security assets worthy of protection and derive the corresponding security goals. Afterwards we elaborate the threats industrial AR applications are exposed to and develop an edge computing architecture for future AR applications which encompasses various measures to reduce security risks for our stakeholders.