Singapore is one of the most technologically advanced cities in the world, but the digital systems and smart infrastructure that makes the city incredible also require a great deal of security to maintain and protect. According to CREATE researcher Xin Lou, the Trustworthy and Secure Cyber-Plexus (TSCP) program “addresses the critical challenge in building a secure and trustworthy cyber-physical system” and will help sort through and analyze the massive quantities of data produced by current and next generation systems.
Critical information infrastructure found in sectors such as energy and transportation in Singapore is typically protected by mature security products such as network-based intrusion detection systems. However, the error rates of those systems often lead to too many false alarms. In order for legitimate alarms to be taken seriously by operators, the system needs to be able to reliably analyze data. Innovations by the TSCP CREATE team under the data analytics and alert response project will mean a more thorough and accurate means of reporting errors and cyber-attacks.
The TSCP improves detection systems by performing various actions in a more secure and accurate manner. This includes checking identities, authorizations, integrity, and other factors that are key to maintaining a secure critical infrastructure. Lou says doing so will “raise the state of analysis of anomaly detection to a level where only significant events are reported, so as to focus human attention only on events of consequence, and to do so without disturbing the system.”
Technology developed under the TSCP program will also cut costs for data mining in two ways: energy consumption and bandwidth consumption. Energy consumption will be greatly lessened by running the machine learning and deep learning tasks on the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) instead of on a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). Bandwidth Consumption will be saved by running all tasks locally. This means transmitting large amounts of data to The Cloud will be unnecessary and will save valuable resources.
“The four pillars of the TSCP CREATE program – system architecture, technology of trust, verification and validation, and this analytics work – address the critical challenges necessary to secure the infrastructures of the 21st century,” says Research Programs Manager William Temple, “The research program will actively engage collaborators across Singapore, including faculty at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, which is our primary research partner.”
According to Lou, the project will not only benefit Singapore, but will also address the challenges of securing critical infrastructure for cities everywhere. “We hope that the technologies developed under TSCP will be impactful in other parts of the world once they have been validated here.”
The impact of TSCP CREATE stretches beyond protecting the reputation of integrity and safety of present systems, but also carries the accompanying potential for industry development that can lead to the trustworthiness of the cyber-plexus. This “ground up” re-engineering will be a major focus in the coming years. According to Lou, the TSCP CREATE will “provide a critical, solution-motivated effort focused at the leading edge of the emerging global turn to ‘by-design engineering’ of trustworthiness and security into major cyber-physical infrastructures.”