Smart Factory Environment: Review of Security Threats and Risks

The Industry 4.0 concept represents a new way of managing production processes. With its application, connections between people, systems, and objects become more complex, creating a dynamic and real-time optimized network. With the establishment of such a network, a smart factory is created. In a smart factory environment, each process must be precisely planned into a connected functional unit in order for the production process to run smoothly. A factory designed in this way has a complex information and communication infrastructure, and thus potentially more significant security threats and risks that it faces than a factory that operates traditionally. The technologies found in the smart factory environment have been evolving for some time. However, their integration with industrial systems poses new security challenges. The smart factory environment's rapid development imposes the need to ensure safe interaction between the production system elements. This paper provides an insight into the environment of a smart factory and the information and communication technologies that enable its operation. The paper provides an overview of security threats and risks that such an environment faces based on the acquired knowledge.