Abstract
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) leads to increasingly-interconnected industrial processes and environments, which, in turn, result in stakeholders collecting a plethora of information. Even though the global sharing of information and industrial collaborations in the IIoT promise significant improvements concerning productivity, sustainability, and product quality, among others, the majority of stakeholders is hesitant to implement them due to confidentiality and reliability concerns. However, strong technical guarantees could convince them of the contrary. Thus, to address these concerns, our interdisciplinary efforts focus on establishing and realizing secure industrial collaborations in the IIoT. By applying private computing, we are indeed able to reliably secure collaborations that not only scale to industry-sized applications but also allow for use case-specific confidentiality guarantees. Hence, improvements that follow from industrial collaborations with (strong) technical guarantees are within reach, even when dealing with cautious stakeholders. Still, until we can fully exploit these benefits, several challenges remain, primarily regarding collaboration management, introduced overhead, interoperability, and universality of proposed protocols.
