Author: PHOENIX project

The main objective of the PHOENIX project is to secure the European Electrical Power and Energy System (EPES) assets and networks against cyber-attacks. A prerequisite for this is indeed represented by secure connectivity, which – although technical means exist – is not supported by a substantial number of legacy EPES assets. The PHOENIX project thus aims at providing additional security features and measures to the legacy systems by developing a Universal Secure Gateway (USG).

The proliferation of the IoT is a new wave of innovation with recent forecasts suggesting massive deployment  of  several  IoT  devices  to  reach  billions of devices.    In  general,  an  IoT  framework  could be  defined  as  the  use  of  heterogeneous  technologies, systems, and TCP/IP protocols, with the growing paradigm of device-to-device communications and the contextual environment.

Collaboration actions between EU Commission projects plays a key role in addressing common challenges, accelerating the dissemination and exploitation of the results and combine efforts on development. It also helps in exchanging experiences while avoiding fragmentation and duplication of efforts.

A security incident is understood as an event that has a negative effect on the properties of confidentiality, integrity or availability, known also as the CIA triad, of communication networks, services or data – stored, under processing or in transit. A security incident may affect any of the CIA triad combinations. A brief summary of the CIA triad is provided below.

EPES digitization and modernization is a double-edged weapon. Despite almost limitless advantages to be gained, digitization brings more opportunities for hackers to outrage the essential infrastructures. Networks are being linked, gaining complexity and allowing more devices to take part of the ecosystem, undoubtedly increasing the attack surface and weak points. How is this affecting the global energy domain? What are the possibilities to countermeasure this threat?

As advanced malicious activity on critical infrastructures are rapidly increasing in frequency and sophistication, the PHOENIX research & development project will aim to provide an impregnable cyber-shield armour for the future European energy systems.

On March 22, 2021, Dr. Artemis Voulkidis, Synelixis Solutions SA, presented the PHOENIX approach towards securing critical energy infrastructures against cyber-attacks, in the 3^rd International Forum on Smart Grids for Smart Cities in the context of the Tech Session 6, related to “Cybersecurity for critical infrastructures”.

The Phoenix project is focused on the cyber-security of Electrical Power and Energy Systems (EPES). One on the first steps on counter-measuring a cyber-attack is to identify the malicious activity. That task can be addressed by anomaly detection techniques. Artificial Intelligence has proven to be a suitable technology for that task.

Nature and its elements are often used as a good metaphor for attacks and risks. Thus, for example, we can talk about attack “trees” and black swan theories. But, as we can read in this blog, we rarely think about “starlings” in this context. Read more to meet the starlings looking for their metaphorical attack trees (or not so metaphorical after all).