CRITISEC: Critical Infrastructure Security

Our society increasingly relies on digitalization of critical infrastructures to achieve significant gains in effectiveness, safety, and better access to societal services for citizens and industries. An important part of the digitalization process is to connect critical infrastructures to the Internet. This creates a wide range of opportunities for security attacks with an enormous potential impact, and thus makes our society vulnerable and unsafe.

The core idea of the CRITISEC project was to develop novel security products, services, and standards for edge networks in critical infrastructures, where the edge networks are a heterogeneous set of networks connected to the edge of a core production network. These services made it possible to connect edge networks to control systems in a secure and robust way, and to secure the edge network itself when it is the critical infrastructure that requires protection (e.g., the 5G network).

Challenges that CRITISEC addressed are the following:
1) the heterogeneity of the edge networks and of the systems they are connected to;
2) the resource-constrained nature of devices (e.g., battery power) and even of networks (packet loss, low bandwidth);
3) the scale of the edge networks, that can be composed of vast numbers of (resource-constrained) devices, so requiring efficient and highly scalable security solutions;
4) the predominant presence of open/shared platforms, where multiple applications share access to a common network of edge devices;
5) the presence of legacy devices and platforms, for which secure update procedures are often scarce, if any.

The CRITISEC consortium was multinational, including partners from Sweden, Luxembourg, and Taiwan. Partners involved were leading contributors in areas such as community development, power delivery systems, smart cities, IoT, 5G and cybersecurity. In addition, companies and institutions involved had prior experience in contributions to standardization work and large European research projects. This combination of leading companies from industry, together with research institutions working on the state-of-the-art, enabled the realization of a very strong consortium.

The main results of this project included novel security standards, solutions, products, and services that can be used by providers of critical infrastructures to secure edge networks connected to their production systems. This reduces the risk of malicious service disruption and preserve availability, reliability, and safety in provisioning of societal services. Detailed project results, including publications, software and demonstrators, can be found on the project website (https://critisec.hitec.lu/).