Albert Rooyakkers
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Albert Rooyakkers
Additional Info
| Job title of nominated professional (or team name) | Founder and CEO of Bedrock Automation |
| Company (where nominated professional or team is working) | Bedrock Automation |
| Website | http://www.bedrockautomation.com |
| Company size (employees) | 10 to 49 |
| Country | United States |
| Headquarters Region | North America |
Overview
Albert Rooyakkers created the Bedrock Open Secure Automation (OSAtm) system, the automation industry’s simplest, most scalable and most secure control system. Its unique architecture features a pin-less electromagnetic I/O backplane, functionality surpassing any conventional PLC, RTU or DCS system, and intrinsic cyber security. Pins are the leading cause of ICS functional failures and vulnerable to snooping for counterfeiting and malware insertion. With zero I/O pins, the Bedrock system reduces this risk significantly.
Unique cyber certificates and keys embedded in all Bedrock modules at birth provide the root of trust against which all hardware and software components must be authenticated. Any module hardware or firmware that fails authentication is disabled from startup. The system also enables authentication of the engineering environment, external I/O devices and third party applications. And he has accomplished this with a design strategy that provides maximum cyber security protection, while also providing an open platform upon which third parties developers can deliver secure applications.
Albert has more than 30 years of automation and electronics industry experience. Before founding Bedrock Automation, he directed business and application development teams for Maxim Integrated Products, including serving as Japan country manager. Prior to that, he served in product and business development capacities for Invensys, including directing product development for systems and sensors and managing the Saudi Aramco and other major accounts, while residing in Saudi Arabia. Accomplishments include developing a parallel processor architecture from whiteboard to silicon, advanced hybrid propulsion systems and currently, designing and commercializing the Bedrock secure industrial control system. Albert holds more than 40 patents in electronics, automation systems and cyber security, with some 70 pending. He has described the basics of his approach to intrinsic ICS cyber security in three white papers that are available at www.bedrockautomation.com, and in a number of presentations, also available there.
Accomplishments
- Albert saw the need for a new open and secure automation platform with deeply embedded cyber security built in “at birth”, and formed a new Silicon Valley company – Bedrock Automation - to design and build it. This approach, starting from a blank sheet of paper for a new automation paradigm, is something mainstream control system vendors have not achieved nor commercialized. Bedrock Automation now has sales and interest from organizations of all sizes, from municipal utilities to the world's largest energy companies, and recognition in numerous industry awards for innovation in cyber security and process control.
- Recognizing that it is not enough to design cyber security into the control system modules; he has also advanced a holistic cyber architecture to address security of what is defined as the Industrial Internet of Things, (IIoT), as well as automation system power, networks, workstations and application security issues. His mission of holistic and intrinsic cyber security also requires a cyber secure supply chain. As an intrinsically secure supply chain was not available from conventional electronic manufacturers, he led the Bedrock effort to design an intrinsically secure manufacturing capability on US soil, and assembled the team, talent and tools to design their own secure digital and analog semiconductors as well as the advanced methods for assembly and test of system components and modules. The extent of this effort -- from components, to architecture, IIoT, and the supply chain -- is unprecedented in not just the automation industry, but is a new benchmark for Made in America secure systems of all types. All of this was accomplished from whiteboard, to finished products running in the real world, in less than four years.
- Albert recognized further that all system modules must also be protected from external cyber physical forces, requiring the invention of advanced electromechanical design feats such as pin-less interconnection technologies to couple power and high speed data into a completely new and revolutionary backplane design. This is built in concert with sealed all-metal module encasements for anti-tamper.
