Cradle-to-Grave Device Lifecycle Management for HVAC and Water Heating Systems A Systems Architecture for Secure, Intelligent, and Resilient Cyber-Physical Products
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63282/3050-9246.IJETCSIT-V7I1P126Keywords:
HVAC, Water Heating, Cyber-Physical Systems, Device Lifecycle Management, PKI, Zero Trust Architecture, IoT Security, Over-the-Air Updates, Digital Twins, Hardware Security, Cryptographic Agility, Certificate ManagementAbstract
Residential and light-commercial HVAC and water-heating systems represent a unique intersection of long-lived capital equipment and rapidly evolving cyber-physical infrastructure. These systems routinely operate for 15 to 25 years, exceeding the operational lifespans of the cloud platforms, cryptographic standards, and security assumptions under which they were deployed. Despite this operational reality, contemporary device architectures treat provisioning, security, operations, and decommissioning as discrete, unrelated phases rather than as continuous states within a unified lifecycle model. This fragmentation creates structural vulnerabilities: devices provisioned with factory-injected credentials lack mechanisms for cryptographic agility; ownership transfer protocols fail to account for multi-stakeholder trust boundaries; and end-of-life procedures remain undefined, leaving deployed devices as perpetual attack surfaces. This paper presents a comprehensive device lifecycle management architecture specifically designed for the operational constraints of HVAC and water-heating equipment. The proposed framework integrates public-key infrastructure (PKI), zero-trust security principles, lifecycle-aware device identity, policy-driven control planes, and digital-twin-based operational intelligence into a cohesive systems architecture. Drawing from real-world OEM deployment constraints, utility demand-response integration requirements, field service realities, and standards-body engineering practices, this work demonstrates how lifecycle-centric design fundamentally improves security posture, operational resilience, regulatory compliance, and long-term business sustainability for connected cyber-physical products.
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