Industrial Control System Resilient Security Technology

Technology Licensing Opportunity - This is not a procurement. Industrial Control System Resilient Security Technology (IReST) Recognizing Cyberattack or Physical Failure in Industrial Control Systems Opportunity: Idaho National Laboratory (INL), managed and operated by Battelle Energy Alliance, LLC (BEA), is offering the opportunity to enter into a license and/or collaborative research agreement to commercialize the IReST technology. Background: Cybersecurity is becoming increasingly more critical every day. There is a current need within dynamic control systems designs to provide a comprehensive methodology to recognize cyberattack or physical failure for a sensor or group of sensors. Current control systems have no methodology to holistically evaluate the cyber-physical health of a system for any individual control loop. This applies specifically to a dynamic evaluation of the health for any individual or set of signals considering anomalies that may occur because of cyber compromise or physical failure. In current control system designs, trust of communications is assumed and therefore recognition of cyberattack is based upon communications sensors such as intrusion detection systems, which have no tie to the individual sensors affected. In the physical world, recognition of anomalies is rudimentary and based upon known failure modes. Description: Researchers at INL have developed the IReST technology that addresses the need within dynamic control systems designs to provide a holistic methodology to recognize cyberattack or physical failure for a sensor or group of sensors. The technology will automatically generate a randomly coded health metric from a random set of industrial control system (ICS) hosts as a floating point value, which is then transmitted, as two pieces, over an ICS network to an elect, but random, group of actuation devices. These actuation devices will transmit a correlating signal across a physical attribute of the process to an elect, but random, group of receivers that transmit a correlating signal over the ICS network back to the original transmitting ICS host. A comparator on the ICS host will recombine the two pieces and evaluate the result to ensure that the original key was not effectively changed. Tolerances will be established to consider latencies and other effects of the communication and data tolerances within the accuracy of the physical transmission signal. Applications: While the methodologies are established for practicing engineers to implement themselves, software vendors would benefit from applying this technology within their industrial control system code distribution. Advantages: IReST is designed to be implemented in cross-vendor and cross-component implementations. Health metrics for control systems are rudimentary and do not consider all aspects of potential degradation, and specifically, cyber-related means. This technology is an effective and resilient method to correlate system health against usurpation by a malicious agent. It can resiliently correlate cyber-physical health in contested environments. It also provides a semi-autonomous setup that runs in the background until issues are identified, in which case a notification is pushed out. Impact: Better industrial control system cybersecurity can have significant impact on cost and time savings. Better security results in fewer failures and better overall performance. Development: TRL 2. Tests are ongoing. Testing of the methodologies in a cyber-physical environment has yielded positive results, but tests are ongoing to finalize the methodologies that will be applied. IP Status: US Patent Application No. 16/204,983, “Systems and Methods for Control System Security,” BEA Docket No. BA-1009. INL is seeking to license the above intellectual property to a company with a demonstrated ability to bring such inventions to the market. Exclusive rights in defined fields of use may be available. Please visit Technology Deployment’s website at https://inl.gov/inl-initiatives/technology-deployment for more information on working with INL and the industrial partnering and technology transfer process. Companies interested in learning more about this licensing opportunity should contact Jon Cook at [email protected].