Prof. Brajabandhu Mishra is working as an Associate Professor(EEE Dept)in BITS Pilani off campus Centre, Bengaluru, India from the last 5 years. Prior to working with BITS, he has spent more than 17 years in Industry in Embedded Software domain in companies like Intel, Broadcom, LG, Pace and many more.

At this point in time, almost all of us who are involved in the technology industry in some or other form must have been aware of the fact that taking care of cyber security related issues has become a necessity. As we progress towards more industrial automation, digital manufacturing, autonomous vehicles, etc, it also becomes important for all the employees of the organization to be aware of the dos and don’ts related to cybersecurity. In this context, stress should do the blue collar workforce of a factory or shop floor in the cybersecurity domain along with training the white collar workforce in the same.

The approach to train a blue-collar employee has to be different from the training approach taken for training an engineering graduate or a post graduate. For an engineering graduate, it can be assumed that the trainee must have some basic background in mathematics andsoftware so that complex cryptography can be easily taught to him or her. But in case of a diploma holder in engineering or I.T.I. students, the same expectation is not valid. Therefore, the training material should be modified in such a way that such an audience will be easily able to grasp it. One of the ways to do is to create the training material to talk about the step by step approaches on how to use the existing security software in the system rather than telling them deep technical know how.

Another important thing the blue collars need to be trained is about higher order concepts like geo fencing and physical security, which is quite prevalent in the industry. Also

training in the world of Internet of Things(IoT), where the power and computing capacity of the end devices are quite limited, cyber security is quite dependent upon security achieved by physical means. In cyber security terminology, ‘physical security’ refers to security at the hardware or chip level. Since power consumption is a big concern for the IoT end devices, security implemented at the hardware level also helps to reduce overall power consumption by the security functionality along with that the software complexity and the memory requirement for the associated security software. As the manufacturing industry is embracing IoT more and more, every employee of such organizations needs to be aware of how to achieve cybersecurity with lower power consumption. Even though the blue-collar workforce needs not to understand how such security highlevel, they should be aware of the high-level functionality.

The approach to train a blue-collar employee has to be different from the training approach taken for training an engineering graduate or a post-graduate

Another challenge in training blue collar employees in India is the language barrier. A large chunk of such employees is not proficient in the English language. Hence providing such training in regional languages in India becomes very important. In fact, this is one barrier that has slowed down the penetration of technology to the ground level in India. Hence it is important to create training materials and establishing training institutes in regional languages in India. Of course vehicles and more, it is a huge task and hence there a lot of business opportunities.

One way of tackling this is to employ Artificial Intelligence in translating the training materials (both text and voice) from English to other Indian Languages. Already a lot of progress has happened in the area of Natural Language Processing(NLP)for specific Indian languages. But still, it is not perfect for many Indian languages and hence there is a lot of cybersecurity to work in this area. Apart from official languages in India, there are many dialects. So imparting training in these dialects must be in our wish list.

The next point to ponder about is when to provide Cybersecurity training? I believe the general cybersecurity concepts should be part of their curriculum irrespective of whoever discipline being pursued. Training specific to their work should be provided by their employer.

Then what topics of cybersecurity should be included for blue scollar? Following is my wish-list of the topics to be included.
1.Various types of security threats in Cyberspace
2.Encryption and Decryption Overview of corresponding Algorithms
3.Viruses, Malwares, Spywares
4.Physical Security Cybersecurity at Hardware Level
5.Cyber Security for the Internet of Things (IoT)
6.Cyber Security in Autonomous Vehicles
7.Cyber Security in Industrial Automation
8.Advanced Cybersecurity Concepts