Protecting industrial infrastructure focus of new academic partnership

Making infrastructure more safe and secure will be the focus of a new partnership between Imperial and a Singaporean University.

Imperial and the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) have signed a five-year agreement that aims to improve the trustworthiness of critical  infrastructure, and to protect the devices for regulating them called industrial control systems, from cyber threats.  The relationship will enmesh the two universities via academic research and student programmes at the PhD level.

Industrial control systems are devices that regulate a range of processes, from power generation to manufacturing and energy distribution. These devices are going through a transition in terms of their design, moving from bespoke devices to off-the-shelf intelligent components and computing tools that are wirelessly connected to one another. This has the advantage making the technology cheaper and also enables engineers to monitor and maintain them remotely. The downside is that this interconnectedness could mean that they are more prone to cyber-attacks. 

Working with government and industry, the new partnership will see academics from both universities developing projects together to make industrial control systems more robust. The collaboration also aims to educate the next generation of engineers from the UK and Singapore, who will be at the forefront of developing industrial control systems of the future.

At Imperial, the partnership will be led by the Institute in Industrial Control Systems in conjunction with the Institute for Security Science and Technology.

Professor Chris Hankin, Director of the Institute in Industrial Control Systems and the Institute for Security Science and Technology, said: “In 2010, Iran’s uranium enrichment programme to create nuclear weapons was allegedly disrupted when the industrial control systems running the plant’s infrastructure were hit by a computer worm known as Stuxnet.  While many people around the world were pleased that Iran’s nuclear ambitions were thwarted, the event showed quite starkly that even well defended systems were vulnerable to cyber threats.  The worm spread rapidly throughout the world with over 100,000 infected hosts by late 2010.  Since that time, there has been a rapidly growing number of new attacks targeted specifically at industrial control systems.”

“Our partnership with Singapore University of Technology and Design will carry out research and student exchanges that have the ultimate aim of equipping both countries with the expertise and technology needed to make our infrastructure more resilient and robust in the face of these threats.”

Professor Aditya Mathur, Head of Pillar for Information Systems Technology and Design and Director of iTrust (a centre for research in cyber security) at SUTD, said Securing critical infrastructure will require collaboration among scientists and engineers across the continents. Such collaboration is essential to meet the enormous challenges arising from several successful attempts that disrupted critical services, the rising number of attempts on critical infrastructure, and the vulnerabilities found in the software embedded in control devices used in critical infrastructure.

"The partnership with Imperial, together with SUTD’s focus on the design of engineering products and systems, significant support from the Singapore Government, and collaboration with MIT, will lead to an experimentally validated set of tools and techniques to enable the design of safe and secure cyber physical systems.

"The faculty and student exchange as part of this collaboration will allow researchers at Imperial to have remote access to two cyber physical test beds in the areas of water treatment and smart grid. Such access will allow researchers to experimentally validate novel attack detection and defence techniques in realistic cyber physical environments. The test beds will also serve as a source for providing much needed training to the students of both universities for manpower development to support the secure design and operation of critical infrastructure.”