Mine Operations Platform Security Guide

Start with safety, operational continuity, and system boundaries

A mine operations platform may coordinate assets, shifts, work, inspections, hazards, maintenance, permits, contractors, production context, stockpiles, samples, dispatch, documents, and management reporting. It may also exchange data with fleet, plant, environmental, laboratory, geographic, or operational technology systems. Security must protect people and continuity without granting a business application unintended control over physical processes.

Map sites, pits or underground areas, plants, remote facilities, networks, devices, users, vendors, systems, data, critical functions, and physical consequences. Classify what the platform may observe, suggest, stage, approve, or change and who owns each decision. Use the mine operations requirements checklist for workflow scope and the implementation roadmap for delivery sequence; this guide focuses on security architecture and evidence.

Inventory assets, interfaces, and trust relationships

Maintain an inventory of servers, cloud services, mobile and rugged devices, gateways, applications, databases, identities, service accounts, integrations, protocols, certificates, radios, remote access, and dependencies. Include owner, location, purpose, version, network zone, data, support state, exposure, recovery priority, and relationship to critical operation. Unknown legacy connections and vendor appliances often matter more than the newest application endpoint.

Document every information path across enterprise IT, site networks, operational technology, vendors, vehicles, labs, and field devices. NIST SP 800-82 Rev. 3 provides guidance for securing OT while accounting for performance, reliability, and safety requirements. Qualified operations, safety, OT engineering, IT, security, and regulatory owners must approve boundaries; software developers should not infer safe connectivity from technical reachability.

Separate zones and mediate cross-boundary exchange

Design network and service zones around consequence and trust rather than organizational charts. Keep internet-facing and corporate services from directly reaching control networks. Use controlled intermediaries, allowlisted flows, authenticated protocols, monitored transfer, protocol breaks where appropriate, and explicit direction. Prevent a compromised web account or vendor integration from becoming an unreviewed path toward plant or vehicle control.

Minimize cross-boundary data and commands. Read-only operational context may support maintenance or reporting without permitting control. If a workflow stages a consequential action, require a separate validated authority and safe execution path with state confirmation. Test malformed and replayed messages, stale data, unavailable intermediaries, duplicated events, compromised credentials, misrouted identifiers, partial updates, and recovery after disconnected operation.

Control workforce, contractor, and vendor identity

Use individual identities and organization memberships for employees, contractors, vendors, visitors, and service accounts. Assign roles by site, function, shift, asset class, project, and time where necessary. Require stronger authentication for privileged and remote users, rapid revocation, controlled recovery, periodic access review, and separate approval for administration, integration, export, and security settings.

Temporary work creates persistent risk when accounts, remote tools, devices, or shared credentials remain after a contract or outage. Automate expiration where possible and connect access to an accountable sponsor. Test transferred workers, changing shifts, emergency responders, expired contractors, unavailable approvers, shared field devices, lost phones, vendor support, and direct API calls. Hidden menus and site selection are not authorization controls.

Secure field and offline workflows

Field devices face dust, vibration, weather, limited power, physical access, loss, shared use, and unreliable networks. Minimize stored data, encrypt devices and local records, bind access to current identity, manage screen lock and revocation, and separate work profiles where supported. Avoid exposing full site rosters, hazard history, or sensitive maps when a task needs only a bounded subset.

Define offline authority explicitly. Permit low-consequence capture and queued work where appropriate, while requiring fresh status or separate confirmation for actions whose stale execution could create harm. Sign or otherwise integrity-protect queued records, preserve device and actor, detect clock uncertainty, resolve conflicts visibly, and prevent retries from duplicating consequential actions. Test long disconnection, full storage, interrupted attachment, changed assignment, revoked user, and device recovery.

Protect operational data, documents, and evidence

Classify production, location, workforce, incident, hazard, environmental, commercial, geological, credential, and personal data by purpose, authority, visibility, retention, and consequence. Apply least privilege at service and record boundaries. Keep private files in protected storage, authorize access at request time, use short-lived delivery, validate uploads, isolate processing, and prevent public links from becoming permanent bypasses.

Preserve append-oriented evidence for inspections, approvals, overrides, maintenance closure, hazards, and security-relevant actions. Corrections should add accountable history instead of rewriting the past. Protect audit logs from ordinary administrators, synchronize trusted time where feasible, limit sensitive content in logs, and define retention with qualified safety, legal, privacy, environmental, and records owners for each operating jurisdiction.

Govern remote access and third-party support

Remote access should be disabled unless required, enabled for a bounded purpose, approved by an accountable owner, strongly authenticated, limited to named systems and actions, monitored, time-bound, and revoked after use. Avoid permanent shared vendor tunnels and unmanaged remote desktop. Record the sponsor, technician, device, reason, window, commands or actions where appropriate, and result without capturing unnecessary secrets.

CISA’s OT cybersecurity principles emphasize decisions that sustain safe and secure OT environments. Treat remote support as an operational decision, not only an IT convenience. Rehearse vendor unavailability, expired credentials, compromised technician accounts, emergency maintenance, jump-host failure, and containment that preserves safe process visibility.

Build, integrate, and update software securely

Apply the NIST Secure Software Development Framework to source, dependencies, builds, testing, release integrity, and vulnerability response. Inventory custom and third-party components, protect deployment credentials, separate environments, verify artifacts, review infrastructure and integration changes, and maintain a private vulnerability reporting path. Coordinate patch decisions with operations because availability and compatibility testing can constrain OT-related changes.

Test role and site isolation, direct APIs, files, validation, business state, queued offline actions, integration authentication, secrets, configuration, backup, and restoration. Use production-like but controlled environments for high-consequence boundaries. Define who can accept a vulnerability temporarily, what compensating control applies, when it expires, and how exposure is monitored rather than letting operational difficulty become permanent silent risk.

Detect, respond, recover, and preserve safe operation

Monitor identity changes, privileged actions, remote sessions, integration anomalies, rejected messages, unusual exports, device posture, configuration changes, malware findings, service health, backup, and cross-zone gateways. Correlate safe identifiers across systems without copying sensitive payloads into central logs. Assign alert ownership by site and shift, establish an out-of-band contact path, and distinguish cyber events from ordinary process or network variation.

CISA’s cross-sector performance goals provide prioritized voluntary practices across IT and OT. Build incident playbooks for compromised accounts, lost field devices, suspicious remote access, ransomware, unavailable cloud, corrupt data, integration failure, and suspected OT boundary breach. Exercise containment with operations so security action does not remove necessary visibility or create an unsafe shutdown.

Turn security into acceptance evidence

Before commissioning work, document sites, critical functions, IT/OT boundaries, asset inventory, remote access, field conditions, roles, contractors, data classes, integrations, continuity, recovery objectives, and accountable owners. Assign every security requirement a scenario, evidence method, owner, and release gate. A policy document without configured controls, tests, operational procedures, and recovery evidence does not prove the platform is secure.

Pilot one bounded workflow and site, verify access, offline synchronization, integration mediation, logging, support, and recovery, then expand through controlled waves. Submit the system map, operating constraints, risks, and acceptance expectations through the project brief for a security-led implementation plan, or use the quick contact page to review the boundary before sharing sensitive architecture details.

Authoritative references

• NIST SP 800-82 Rev. 3 Guide to Operational Technology Security
• CISA Principles of Operational Technology Cybersecurity
• CISA Cross-Sector Cybersecurity Performance Goals
• NIST Secure Software Development Framework

Related software planning guides

• Mine Operations Platform Requirements Checklist
• Mine Operations Software Cost and Budget Guide
• Mine Operations Software Implementation Roadmap