Railroad

The US rail transportation sector is undergoing a massive digital transformation to improve safety and efficiency by leveraging edge computing to increase visibility, management, tracking, monitoring, and control of assets in the field. A secure move to the edge can make a tremendous impact in the following key areas within the industry:

Locomotive and Freight Wheels :

• Wayside detectors to identify defects on passing rail cars such as overheated bearings or damaged wheels
• Wheel profile monitors to capture images of wheels
• Trackside acoustic detector systems to evaluate the sound of internal wheel bearings to identify those approaching failure
• Wheel temperature detectors to determine if brakes are properly set or are applied only when appropriate

Locomotives and Freight Cars

Monitor critical functions and performance, such as location, loaded/unloaded status, humidity, temperature, and other health checks within the locomotives and individual freight cars.

Track and Infrastructure

Remote monitoring capabilities to ascertain the structural health of the wayside tracks, bridges, and railroad assets at the maintenance yards.

Addressing Cyber Risks

The deployment and management of network infrastructures for railroad use cases are both complex and time-intensive, creating unique security, connectivity, bandwidth, packet routing, onboarding, and scalability challenges:

• By connecting devices to the public Internet, railroad companies increase the attack surface, exposing themselves to unknown cyber threats.
• Poor device security from manufacturers renders connected devices, on the railcars, railyards, and wayside tracks, extremely vulnerable.
• Manual key provisioning and onboarding, used to secure personal computers and devices on the public Internet, cannot scale for vast numbers of edge devices.

Moreover, cyberattacks have the potential to disrupt production and increase costs, directly impacting business outcomes. Although cyber-insurance policies may cover some losses from cyberattacks, such coverage is unlikely to cover all losses or all types of claims that arise.

The right solution addresses these risks in providing a secure networking foundation for railroad operators, one that in turn allows them to realize the following benefits safely:

• Digitally onboard railroad assets to manage the fleet more effectively and efficiently
• Implement proactive and responsive condition-based maintenance based on real-time fleet data
• Get granular visibility into field operations, increase the fleet’s utilization rate, and reduce idle time.

Xaptum’s Solution

The ENF enhances the security, reliability, and management of railroad assets by providing the following key benefits:

Zero Trust Networking with Microsegmentation

Rooted in the principle of “never trust, always verify,” ENF’s Zero Trust Networking does not assume a device is trusted just because it is connected to the network. Default-deny firewall rules are used in isolating remote endpoints to mitigate risks of lateral attacks. Furthermore, Xaptum enables microsegmentation of railroad assets based on identity, application traffic, etc., into policy-based security zones.

SASE-Centric Offering Purpose-Built for the Edge

Xaptum enables a “Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)” that primarily acts as an Edge Proxy for security services in the cloud made available right at the edge where the devices live. This brings about the seamless delivery of required services and policy enforcements in real time, independent of device location.

Interoperable Communication

The overlay network decouples the last-mile Internet access and sits between edge devices and the edge compute servers. Persistent IPv6 addresses remain unaltered with connection changes and drops along the tracks. As a standards-compliant IP (layer 3) network, ENF supports any kind of last-mile wireless access, interfaces with any cloud services, and works with any compatible hardware/gateways. To learn more about the solution’s interoperability, please refer to FAQs on the topic.

Hardware Root of Trust

Xaptum provides both software and hardware-based security and uses the industry-standard TPM 2.0 from Infineon. Besides enabling Zero Touch Provisioning , the hardware-rooted keys and associated cryptographic functions enable a secure, hardware boot process.

TPM Security Functions