Safety mechanisms of ZigBee technology for safety-related industrial applications

Authors describe the possibilities of a wireless technology used within safety-critical applications with orientation to selection the computationally safety cryptography techniques. Undetected corruption of data transmission can cause substantially considerable damages within equipments, environments or demands on human health and this is reason why systems have to be designed so that guarantee required Safety Integrity Level. For this reason the safety-related wire or wireless machines must have implemented a number of safety mechanisms located into special safety or security profiles. Nowadays, after acceptation of the new standard ISA 100.11a the barrier was broken towards the use of wireless machine-to-machine communications in standard and safety-related communication, too. ZigBee technology is very accepted standard which fulfils the requirements to the wireless industrial communication system. The main part of the paper describes the possible attacks to ZigBee communications based on cryptography mechanisms with orientation to Denial-of-Service attack. The practical part contains the results of ZigBee sensor network testing in laboratory conditions with demonstration of error-control mechanisms of MESH topology and cryptoanalytic’s attacks based on monitoring of traffic are mentioned as well.