EU Horizon: InfraStress Project

How to protect sensitive industry assets against cyber-phyiscal threats? The EU powered Horizon 2020 project (Ref. 833088) addresses the cyber-physical security of critical infrastructures and industry plants. Hololight supports the project with its technological expertise and is a proud consortium member.    

In a consortium of 27 partners from 11 countries led by the Italian digital transformation player Engineering SPA, we started to work on methods to improve the cyber-physical security of sensitive industrial plants (SIPS) and critical infrastructure (CI) in Europe. By developing an open testbed stress-testing system, we intend to find ways to prevent, detect, response and mitigate both: combined physical and cyber threats. 

By using Augmented Reality and smart glasses, Hololight works on a better assessment of these critical and industrial environments: Via AR operators and workers can be trained, how to have a clampdown on cyber-physical threats and hazards.     

Protecting the growing attack surface  

The cloud as well as connected devices create an ever-expanding surface for threats. According to a recent report by McAfee, 6 out of 10 IT professionals were witnesses of serious data breaches. This outcome as well as many others reveal the need to carefully protect industrial IT environments as they are exposed to large scale, cyber-physical threats and hazards. 

The continuity of operations needs to be guaranteed by all means. At the same time, it is important to minimize cascading effects in the infrastructure itself, the environment or other critical infrastructure and citizens in vicinity. And of course: vulnerability needs to be diminished at a reasonable cost.  

InfraStress addresses all these challenges in form of an integrated framework for the European cyber-physical security. The project intends to drive business innovations in the industry and security sector. And creates a basis to accelerate the growth of security companies in the rapidly growing industrial C/P security markets. Furthermore, it is about creating a culture of security and training on these new approaches. All of the 27 partners in the consortium have cross-cutting and complementary competences on the project theme.  

Outlook and Objectives 

Within the next two years InfraStress will develop their solutions with the technological readiness level TRL4 towards TRL7. The integrated framework contains cyber and physical threat detection in a synergic way, integrated C/P Situational Awareness, Threat Intelligence, and an innovative methodology for resilience assessment – all tailored to each site. 

In February the second general assembly and plenary meeting took place in Cork (Ireland). In the next months we will provide further updates and information about events with talks from experts about this project. 

Learn more about the project on the InfraStress website: https://www.infrastress.eu/