Cybersecurity Technologies Playing Increasingly Significant Role in Digital Transformation

Committed to Protecting Social Systems against Furtive Threats
SAITO Shiro

Toshiba's Approach to Strengthening of Cybersecurity
AMANO Takashi
With billions of devices now connected to the Internet due to the rapid progress of digital transformation, social and business environments are changing. At the same time, the danger of cyberattacks is increasing, exposing not only information systems but also all connected products and services to a new level of threats. This is also increasing the risk of physical damage to social infrastructure and manufacturing facilities. New regulations and guidelines are consequently being established both in Japan and abroad.
The Toshiba Group is further strengthening its security systems in response to this situation. As part of these efforts, we are expanding the focus of security to include the design and manufacturing stages taking the operation of products into consideration, and are collaborating with suppliers to enhance the security of supply chain networks.

Industrial IoT Security Architecture
SHIBA Masue / IKEDA Tatsuro / OKADA Koji
Digital transformation is expanding in a wide range of fields in both industry and society via the Internet of Things (IoT). While the myriads of interconnected IoT devices are creating new business models, they are also exposed to an increased risk of cyberattacks.
To address this problem, Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation has developed the concept of lifetime security protection, which emphasizes the protection of key products and systems of important infrastructure and industrial control systems throughout their life cycles, and a security reference architecture, which is designed to build robust security into IoT systems at their design stage in a flexible manner according to the breadth and depth of their utilization. We are now creating IoT systems using this architecture, taking the cost-security balance into consideration.

Cybersecurity Technologies Ensuring Safe, Secure, and Long-Term Operation of Control Systems for Infrastructure
HARUKI Hiroyoshi / KOIKE Masanobu / TAKUMI Shinya
In line with the ongoing progress of information networking, control systems for critical infrastructure are facing various types of security threats. In particular, demand has arisen for the protection of such systems against increasing cyberattacks. To realize stable long-term operation, it is necessary to continuously apply the latest countermeasures against cyberattacks after the commencement of commercial operation, as well as to implement security countermeasures in the product design and development phases.
The Toshiba Group has been promoting research and development of the following cybersecurity technologies for control systems in operation: (1) a whitelisting execution control technology called WhiteEgret™ that can protect the systems against unknown malwares by checking a list of allowed applications registered in advance , and (2) a group key management technology that can efficiently and securely provide and update a group key to localize the area targeted in a cyberattack.

Security Certification Obtained for Unified Controller nv series type2
ITO Yu / TATENO Genki / UMEDA Yuji
The importance of system security continues to increase in the field of measurement and control systems for infrastructure facilities. This is particularly true in the case of social infrastructure systems.
Toshiba Infrastructure Systems & Solutions Corporation has obtained ISASecure^® Embedded Device Security Assurance (EDSA) certification for its Unified Controller nv series type2. The use of the type2 controller as a core controller provides control systems with robust security against the threat of cyberattacks.

Efforts of Toshiba Group to Improve Security in Software Development Processes
KOGA Kunihide
Many systems now work in synchronicity with other systems and with the cloud. To ensure the security of software for these systems, a design methodology that makes it difficult to introduce vulnerabilities into software and resources for removing them at an early stage are necessary.
The Toshiba Group is endeavoring to improve software security through the application of six measures: (1) establishment of secure coding standards, (2) development and provision of education courses on secure coding, (3) selection and use of tools for validating compliance with secure coding rules, (4) adoption of tools for evaluating the vulnerabilities of open-source software, (5) selection and use of tools for emulating attacks using false input data, and (6) development of tools for improving the efficiency of various tools.

Control System Testbed to Improve Accuracy and Efficiency of Security Verification Using Virtualization Technology
MARUCHI Shunya / IIDA Yasutaka / KANAI Jun
As digital transformation progresses, control systems are being increasingly connected to external networks for remote maintenance, requiring enhancement of security against cyberattacks. A test environment called a testbed is generally used to verify the validity of security measures before they are incorporated into a control system. However, conventional testbeds cannot fully simulate the configuration and behavior of a control system for cost and other reasons.
To address this problem, Toshiba Corporation has developed a testbed capable of replicating a control system in a virtual space, drawing on its virtualization technology. This testbed can record the internal state of a system at any point of time, making it possible to bring a system back to its state prior to a simulation and thereby iterate simulations. We have used this testbed to simulate a control system and confirmed its effectiveness in incorporating security measures into control systems.

"Toshiba Communication AI RECAIUS" Services Aiming to Innovate Workstyles

Collaboration between Humans and Artificial Intelligence Accelerating Business Revolution
TADA Tomoki

RECAIUS Communication AI Technologies for Workstyle Innovation in Digital Revolution Era
KOYAMA Noriaki / KURODA Yuka
The ongoing digital revolution dubbed the "industrial digital transformation" is changing business process styles, creating a virtuous cycle of development of cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and autonomous control systems in real (physical) and virtual (information) spaces. Although Japan has successfully developed advanced technologies and systems, its industries are currently facing the urgent issue of improving labor productivity through workstyle innovation.
The Toshiba Group has developed the RECAIUS communication AI services encompassing three key areas of AI: digitization, knowledge bases, and interactions. The advanced technologies of RECAIUS communication AI will promote workstyle innovation at factories, field engineering sites, customer service centers, and other workplaces.

Rapidly Constructible Spoken Dialog System to Support Automation and Enhance Efficiency of Business Operations
SUGIURA Chikashi
As the use of smart speakers and other spoken dialog systems spreads, demand is increasing for spoken dialog systems for business use to automate business operations and enhance their efficiency. However, task-oriented dialog systems required by business applications require costly development associated with the processing of language understanding.
Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation has structurized a dialog system into a model using purpose-node and item-leaf structures so as to develop a technology that allows processing modules equivalent to a node with leaves to perform language understanding. A generalized design approach has been adopted, making it possible to reuse these modules and thus reduce development costs.

AI Technology Adding New Value to Business Documents and Records of Conversations to Support Customer Relations
TOBITA Yoshikata / SHIMIZU Ayumu / SUZUKI Masaru
Due to the rising mobility of labor, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find and employ customer service personnel who have a solid knowledge of products and services as required by a given company. In addition, as each company endeavors to differentiate its products from those of other companies, the amount of knowledge that customer service personnel need to acquire is increasing, creating an imbalance between the demand for and supply of skilled personnel.
To solve this problem, Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) technology to convert audio and textual records of conversations with customers into valuable information so as to improve the quality and efficiency of customer services. This AI technology is now offered as a platform.

Speech Middleware to Incorporate Speech Interface into Smart Devices
SETO Shigenobu / MIKAMI Shigeru
In order to add a speech interface function to home appliances and mobile devices, speech recognition and speech synthesizer engines are required that can operate well even in an environment with a limited amount of memory and low computational capacity.
Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation provides speech middleware components that work in real time with the limited resources of local devices. The voice trigger middleware and the ToSpeak text-to-speech (TTS) middleware available with RECAIUS make it possible to realize smart electronic devices incorporating speech recognition and speech synthesis functions. These middleware components are effective for the development of high-quality speech interfaces with small memory consumption.

Creation of New Businesses by Hybridization of Cloud Services and Edge Devices
MATSUMOTO Nobuyuki / SHIBATA Tomoyuki / TANAKA Takashi
With the wide dissemination of cloud services in the field of information and communication technology (ICT) in recent years, edge computing has become essential for the Internet of Things (IoT).
"Toshiba Communication AI RECAIUS" provided by Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation have already been supplying cloud services and middleware products for edge computing. We have now launched a hybridization project to make these services and products work in tandem. Based on this hybridization concept, we have worked on two programs: double security based on face authentication using an IoT platform, and person matching using images captured by multiple cameras through coordination of the edge, fog, and cloud computing layers. From the results obtained, we have confirmed the effectiveness of this approach for creating complementary and synergetic effects.

Efforts for Development of Technology to Automatically Customize Voice Recognition Dictionaries to Meet Customer Requirements
CHO Kenta / ABE Kazuhiko
In the business-to-business (B2B) market, attention has become increasingly focused in recent years on voice recognition. In response to the market demand for various types of voice data meeting the specific requirements of individual customers, the customization of voice recognition dictionaries is necessary. However, the need for experts on voice recognition and reduction of the time required for such complicated customization work are significant issues in this field.
Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation has been supplying "Toshiba Communication AI RECAIUS" services, which combine various media intelligence technologies including voice recognition, text-to-speech, and intelligent dialogue and image recognition. In these services, we are making efforts to develop a new technology to automatically customize voice recognition dictionaries optimized for each customer. By applying a newly developed platform to efficiently implement the customization processes for voice recognition dictionaries, this technology makes it possible to reduce the time required for customization by approximately 40%, significantly shortening the period required for customizing multiple voice recognition dictionaries.

Statistical Spoken Dialog System for Reduction of Development and Customization Costs
IWATA Kenji / YOSHIDA Takami
Numerous spoken dialog systems and services have been appearing in recent years. However, in order to realize interactions with human users via speech or natural text, dialog systems must be tailored to suit the needs of specific systems or services and therefore incur considerable development or customization costs.
Toshiba Corporation is working to address this problem by using statistical methods for spoken dialog systems. Among the results achieved are the following: (1) a framework that uses reinforcement learning to automatically generate dialog scenarios from a dialog corpus, (2) a spoken language understanding technique that makes it possible to understand utterance contents including unknown words without the need for retraining by using deep learning with an attention mechanism, and (3) a function that controls dialog scenarios by adjusting the degree of recommendation. These methods have contributed to realization of the development and customization costs of dialog systems without compromising their performance.

Dereverberation Method to Improve Accuracy of Recognition of Spoken Language Collected by Distant Microphone
KAGOSHIMA Takehiko / KIM Uihyun / AKAMINE Masami
A speech recognition system for spoken language collected by a single distant microphone is expected to be applicable to the preparation of minutes of meetings. To further expand the applicability of such a system, improvement of recognition accuracy is required. However, the degradation of recognition accuracy due to reverberation when using a single distant microphone is a crucial issue.
Toshiba Corporation has now developed a dereverberation method based on recursive weighted prediction error (RWPE) through the application of a moving average (MA) model of reverberation received by a single distant microphone, as well as an effective means of avoiding instability of the infinite impulse response (IIR) filter employed in this method. Experiments using samples of spoken language generated with simulation of the reverberation occurring when utilizing a single distant microphone have confirmed that our newly developed method based on RWPE offers superior recognition accuracy compared with conventional methods based on weighted prediction error (WPE). This method makes it possible to perform real-time processing on a PC by reducing the amount of computation required, utilizing only about 5% of the processing capacity of the central processing unit (CPU).

Requirement Management Tool to Secure Traceability and Improve Efficiency of Software Development
YAMANAKA Miho / OHTO Mayumi / YAMAMOTO Kazuko
In software development, traceability is used as a means of guaranteeing the quality of products. Securing traceability makes it possible to associate requirements with downstream deliverables so that they can be tracked, making it easy to reflect requirements in downstream deliverables without omissions.
Toshiba Corporation has developed a requirement management tool that imports requirements and downstream deliverables and links them, thereby reducing the workload involved in securing traceability. To allow adaptability to the different development processes and deliverables for each business domain and product domain, the method of importing data into the tool can be flexibly customized. We are now providing this tool as a cloud service to relevant design departments in the Toshiba Group.

Ongoing Introduction of 100 kW Hydrogen Fuel Cell Systems Contributing to Realization of Hydrogen Society
YABUKI Masanori / KONO Motoki / SAKATA Yoshiaki
The development of hydrogen energy technologies is progressing in Japan toward the realization of a carbon dioxide-free hydrogen society.
The Toshiba Group is engaged in the development of the following three technologies to provide customers with total solution systems: (1) hydrogen production technologies, (2) hydrogen storage technologies, and (3) hydrogen power generation technologies including hydrogen fuel cell systems. As part of these efforts, Toshiba Fuel Cell Power Systems Corporation is engaged in the development and production of a lineup of hydrogen fuel cell systems called H2Rex™, consisting of three models with capacities of 700 W, 3.5 kW, and 100 kW, respectively. The large-capacity 100 kW model has already been installed at five sites as a key facility supporting the realization of a hydrogen society. We have also developed a next-generation 100 kW model that achieves downsizing, space saving, and cost reduction. Furthermore, we are working on the development of a MW-class model based on the technologies acquired through development of the next-generation 100 kW model.

Plug-In Type UPS Realizing Labor Saving at Time of Renewal
KAWADE Daisuke / TAMASHIRO Masaki / TAKEI Yoshihiro
　Stable operation of information and communication systems and data centers, including network services and communication equipment, has become essential in people's daily lives in recent years. The introduction of an uninterruptible power system (UPS) as key electrical equipment in such systems has therefore become increasingly important. In addition to enhancing the reliability of the power supply, a UPS must have high efficiency while also realizing labor saving at the time of renewal.
To fulfill these market requirements, Toshiba Infrastructure Systems & Solutions Corporation has developed a plug-in type UPS applying a plug-in structure to the main circuit terminal section. The plug-in structure of the newly developed UPS allows easy replacement, making it possible to shorten the renewal period from the conventional two weeks to two or three days. In addition, cost reductions and space saving through the continuous use of peripheral sections and external cables for the UPS without any changes are expected to contribute to a reduction of the UPS life-cycle cost.

FR2100T Model 700 Rackmount Industrial Computer
HAYANO Toru / NAKAMURA Tadamichi / SHIBAMIYA Toru
Industrial computers are applied to a wide range of systems in the social infrastructure field including various types of monitoring and control systems. With the ongoing introduction of smart technologies into manufacturing facilities in recent years accompanying the advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT), enormous volumes of data are being generated. This has led to increasing demand for industrial computers offering higher performance and larger capacity.
Toshiba Infrastructure Systems & Solutions Corporation has developed the FR2100T model 700 industrial computer in response to this demand. The FR2100T model 700 achieves both space-saving by the use of a 2U (87 mm) rackmount chassis and high data processing performance due to its sixth-generation Intel^® Xeon^® processor and DDR4 (double data rate fourth-generation) memory. This model inherits the robustness; easy maintainability; reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) functions; and long-term product supply and maintenance capability that we have cultivated in its predecessor models over many years, and will contribute to the stable operation of social infrastructure systems.

Storage Battery System Incorporating SCiB™ Lithium-Ion Rechargeable Battery Cells Compliant with SIL4 of RAMS Standards
KURODA Kazuto / TAKAHASHI Jun / HAGIWARA Keizo
With the ongoing introduction of storage battery systems in the electric power and automotive fields, the installation of storage battery systems on rolling stock to achieve effective utilization of electricity has also become a focus of attention in recent years. As railway systems used for mass transportation are required to ensure safety, such storage battery systems in the international market, especially in the European market, must be compliant with EN (European Norm) 50126, or the so-called reliability, availability, maintainability, and safety (RAMS) standards.
Against this background, Toshiba Infrastructure Systems & Solutions Corporation has developed a battery module that incorporates SCiB™ lithium-ion rechargeable battery cells compliant with safety integrity level 4 (SIL4) of the RAMS standards. This battery module makes it possible to construct storage battery systems targeted at European rolling stock.

Item-Spotting OCR Technology to Automatically Locate Recognition Targets
SUZUKI Tomohisa / YOKOTA Kazuaki
The emergence of robotic process automation (RPA) in combination with printed and handwritten documents has made optical character recognition (OCR) a key technology for the improvement of productivity in business processes. Since the conventional implementation of OCR requires models specifying the position coordinates and formats of the items to be recognized, time-consuming preparation of these models has been an obstacle to automation. This obstacle is especially pronounced in cases where the number of forms is large or the layouts of the forms are inconsistent and unpredictable.
To enable RPA in such cases, Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation has developed an item-spotting OCR technology that can automatically find the locations of items targeted for recognition by searching for strings or patterns specified for those items and/or the corresponding labels.