Flow computers are critical components in the oil and gas mining platform offshore. Providing accurate measurement, calculation, and monitoring of fluid flow, they enable custody transfer, production optimization, regulatory compliance, and data-driven decision-making. In some cases, flow computers may even have the capability to perform control and automation.

In recent years, many governments have enforced strict requirements to collect data related to oil and gas, for various reasons including regulatory compliance, environmental monitoring, resource management, and economic planning. Our end user, an oil and gas giant, has to channel these offshore data through a wide distance via wireless communication to the monitoring center situated in the onshore IT infrastructure.

Wireless technology is convenient for remote monitoring and management, yet creates more threat vectors at the same time. Malicious actors can leverage this “convenience” to attack the oil and gas components. For example, they may steal a trusted machine’s credentials through social engineering or phishing emails, or exploit zero day vulnerabilities, to perform a pivot attack.

Typically, hackers target vulnerable devices that can cause huge damage—one of these is flow computers. A hacked flow computer in the oil and gas industry may produce inaccurate measurements, operational disruption, safety hazards, and regulatory violations, resulting in loss of trust, financial impact, and increased cybersecurity risks for the platform. Any of these are high stakes that our end-user wishes to avoid. Thus, BlackBear Cyber Security was tasked to safeguard the flow computer and essentially the full platform.

Offshore platforms have unique requirements in terms of communication security. Situated in remote and harsh environments, physical security measures are difficult to implement and maintain. Cloud based cyber security approach could be expensive to implement as the bandwidth are limited, considering it relies on communication channels such as satellite, radio, and microwave links. They have limited bandwidth for data transfer, restricting the deployment of security tools and the ability to send and receive real-time threat intelligence.

Thus, compared to normal industrial systems, not only is there higher risk of malicious acts or equipment breakdown, the damage and consequences are also higher in offshore oil and gas platforms. In order to collect data from offshore equipment, a proactive protection and alert system is absolutely necessary. We strived to implement a cybersecurity solution that is secure yet simple both from the implementation and maintenance standpoints.

SOLUTION PROVIDED

In our topology, oil and gas field devices are connected to the flow computer then to an edge computer, which processes the data before sending it to the monitoring center by MQTT protocol. The user can then monitor the data via SCADA UI. The topology is redundant to ensure high availability communication.