IIA Industrial Independence Alliance

Industrial Independence Alliance

Operational sovereignty
for industrial infrastructure.

Control systems act on physics, not on information. The Alliance publishes the principles that follow from that distinction and the architecture that operationalizes them.

New to industrial automation, ICS, or operational technology? Start here →

The Philosophy

Why we build it this way.

The substrate distinction. The SRP Triad — Safety, Reliability, Performance — governs the ACS substrate. Information is governed by CIA. Six principles follow.

  • SRP Triad · after Robert Radvanovsky / Infracritical
  • PERA+ alignment · Gary Rathwell / Entercon
  • Six principles, plus the substrate principle
Read The Philosophy →

The Architecture

How it deploys.

Industrial Independence Architecture (IIA). One self-contained unit at every zone of an industrial network. Identical at every level. Scope is the only thing that changes.

  • The box · the fractal · data contracts
  • SL3 floor · SL4 via hardware diode
  • IEC 62443 · ISA-95 · CESMII i3X
Read The Architecture →

§ The fractal

The same unit deploys at every PERA scope — from a single production cell to a regional aggregate. Scope changes. The architecture does not.

The Fractal — same unit at every PERA scope A vertical stack showing the IIA box deployed at every level of the PERA hierarchy: L0/L1 field and control at the bottom, L2 production zone boxes, L3 plant box, L4 site box, and L5 regional/corporate/cloud box at the top. Data and contracts flow upward; manifests and approvals flow downward. Each box is sovereign and complete. The fractal does not collapse at the top. PERA L0 / L1 Field & Control PLC · SCADA · HMI sensors · actuators · IO analog · fieldbus · EtherNet/IP Wireless IO sensing LoRaWAN · LPWAN PERA L2 Production Zone Boxes box zone A box zone B box zone C PERA L3 Plant Box box plant · aggregates zone boxes PERA L4 Site Box  ·  L3↔L4 = canonical plant firewall box site · aggregates plant boxes PERA L5 Regional / Corporate / Cloud Box box corporate · aggregates site boxes · optional The Fractal data + contracts (north) manifests · approvals (south) Same unit at every level. Only scope changes. The fractal does not collapse at the top.
The Fractal — PERA L0–L5 · same unit, different scope · each box sovereign and complete

§ Reference implementations

What the principles look like in shipped software. Independent products, built on IIA.

MarlinSpike

The modern GrassMarlin.

The maintained, multi-user successor to NSA’s GrassMarlin (EOL 2017). Open-source passive OT/ICS topology workbench. Captures in, zero packets out.

grassmarlin.com →

Conversational Factory

A factory you can talk to.

Read-only OT platform. Passive wire-witness DPI across 34 protocols, medallion data lake, i3X v1 · MCP query surface for operators and AI clients. Every answer bound to an append-only audit chain.

conversationalfactory.com →

Sovereignty bridges the two

Industrial independence is not a technology position. It is an operational sovereignty position. The entity that controls the automation infrastructure controls the operation.