An illustrative case study of how ForgeTek Industries secured their valuable proprietary processes with Hopr's Korvette WoSPs.
In 2024, OT and Data Protection for Smart Manufacturers like ForgeTex Industries, digitize everything — from recipe logic to robotic controls — making them vulnerable to the same cyber attacks that plague IT networks.
Hopr's Korvette™ WoSPs enable ForgeTex Industries to protect its crown jewels: proprietary process logic, control application integrity, and operational data in transit across clusters, clouds, and factories.
Each factory receives digital job orders from HQ containing composite part specifications and associated process “recipes” (e.g., curing time, pressure, oven temps). K3s control apps ingest job specs via APIs from a centralized job scheduler or MES (Manufacturing Execution System).
Static APIÂ keys are used between ForegTek HQ and the factory MES are vulnerable to theft when early TLS termination occurs at the factory gateway.
Robots assemble composite parts following precise sequences across stations. Each robot or station communicates with containerized control apps in the K3s cluster, orchestrated by an internal control mesh.
Implicit trust and no workload identity verification between pods/stations exposes ForgeTek to rogue services that inject false commands.
ForgeTek factories share yield performance, quality metrics, and adjustments to process parameters in near real time to optimize outcomes. Factory edge clusters connect via VPN and sync telemetry through REST APIs.
Static tokens and certs used to authorize data sharing can be stolen and replayed.
Third-party suppliers (robotic arms, vision systems) remotely connect to perform diagnostics or updates. Secure tunnels or APIs are opened temporarily, often using whitelisted IPs or fixed credentials.
Third party access relies on IP filtering, not workload identity or behavior. No secret rotation or session uniqueness means attackers can hijack access or pivot into critical systems.
ForgeTek Industries is a precision manufacturing company producing proprietary composite engine parts. They operate four smart factories in different states, each running containerized OT workloads in K3s clusters. Their business relies on the integrity of real-time sensors and process management across several factory sites each produce parts of their top selling product. They deployed Korvette-S WoSPs with the workloads within each smart factory and Korvette-SE WoSPs at OT workloads at the factory 'edge'.
Korvette WoSPs, designed for the Zero Trust era, assured secure and trusted internal and edge API transactions.
ForgeTex Industries' proprietary could not trust the identities of their OT workloads and third parties and threats could not be blocked.
