TROCI

Project Summary: Critical infrastructures are necessary for a country to function and upon which daily life depends. In light of the recent geopolitical events, protecting these infrastructures from various threats are very important to ensure national security and well-being of the citizens. Instrumentation and control (I&C) systems are widely used to collect data through sensors from various nodes, make decisions and ensure smooth operation through remote and/or autonomous control of these infrastructures. With the recent adoption of digital I&C makes these infrastructures vulnerable to cyber-physical attacks through increased number of attack surfaces. Cyber security infringements targeting I&C systems are a growing concern worldwide. If unmitigated, the attacks can have dangerous consequences. Traditional I&C systems were designed for a time with centralised data-processing for analytics and control purposes. This approach is no longer fit for purpose owing to the system complexity and the emergence of new threat actors and vectors. To fill this void, we envision to develop a comprehensive hybrid hardware-software security and privacy solutions for the critical infrastructure resilience enhancement. Realisation of this vision will require system-level thinking, multidisciplinary expertise, and effective industrial end user engagement. By adopting a fundamentally new approach in designing the I&C systems, the proposed solution will be co-designed with emphasis on optimising the hardware-software interaction, minimising the information flow, reducing the risk of hardware fault through redundancy and smartification, lowering the number of intrusion attack surfaces through minimum sensor placement, safeguarding the data from poisoning through local processing and enhancing energy-efficiency through innovative software platform design. The results will be developed with our industrial end users and will be deployed in advanced use cases involving water distribution systems and nuclear power plants. The scientific and technical breakthroughs promised in this project will open new research opportunities in critical infrastructure resilience enhancement, promote objective benchmarking, develop skilled manpower and accelerate industry adoption. Relevance to the topic: A secure and resilient cyber-physical platform for the instrumentation and control system of critical infrastructure (CI) will be developed in this project. By leveraging multidisciplinary academic and industrial expertise in hardware, software and engineering applications, the developed platform will ensure the security, privacy, and resilience of the I&C systems while at the same time maintaining the system performance. Our proposal covers all the expected impacts and most of the targeted outcomes. Using high-risk high-gain approach, we will improve the privacy and security of I&C systems by adopting a hardware-software co-design method which will include innovative sensing system, sensor placement optimisation, sensor fault monitoring, detection and prevention of new threat vectors, privacy-centric algorithm development and deployment for real-time resilience enhancement of critical water and energy infrastructure. Our solution will be adaptive and end-to-end reconfigurable. Leading the development of this nascent CI I&C system resilience field, we will contribute to support future challenges in this area through development of objective benchmarks and datasets. The consortium promotes gender balance and includes participation from widening countries and leading industrial end users.