Abstract
The railway transport system is critical infrastructure that is exposed to numerous man-made and natural threats, thus protecting this physical asset is imperative. Cyber security, privacy, and dependability (SPD) are also important, as the railway operation relies on cyber-physical systems (CPS) systems. This work presents SPD-Safe—an administration framework for railway CPS, leveraging artificial intelligence for monitoring and managing the system in real-time. The network layer protections integrated provide the core security properties of confidentiality, integrity, and authentication, along with energy-aware secure routing and authorization. The effectiveness in mitigating attacks and the efficiency under normal operation are assessed through simulations with the average delay in real equipment being 0.2–0.6 s. SPD metrics are incorporated together with safety semantics for the application environment. Considering an intelligent transportation scenario, SPD-Safe is deployed on railway critical infrastructure, safeguarding one outdoor setting on the railway’s tracks and one in-carriage setting on a freight train that contains dangerous cargo. As demonstrated, SPD-Safe provides higher security and scalability, while enhancing safety response procedures. Nonetheless, emergence response operations require a seamless interoperation of the railway system with emergency authorities’ equipment (e.g., drones). Therefore, a secure integration with external systems is considered as future work.
Highlights
Railways continue to be one of the main transport systems nowadays [1,2], covering public, private, and military needs over a wide operational area
The system consists of a dispersed sensor network that is installed on the vehicles and railway infrastructure, along with the data acquisition component and a data server that maintains the artifacts of the management and analysis procedures
This paper introduced SPD-Safe, an administration framework for Internet of Things (IoT) settings in ambient secure and safety-critical domains, applied to protect a railway cyber-physical systems (CPS)
Summary
Railways continue to be one of the main transport systems nowadays [1,2], covering public, private, and military needs over a wide operational area. Since the interconnection of this monitoring equipment is, at least partly, wireless, it can become a target of several types of attacks In this context and considering that a successful attack could damage the railway’s operation or even cause severe injuries and deaths, cybersecurity is an important consideration for such interconnected critical systems [11,12]. In the context of the two use cases (a) and (b) above, through SPD-Safe the railway CPS is configured in real-time to tackle ongoing cyberattacks and control safety-related incidents. This hands-on validation was developed and demonstrated under the EU-funded project new embedded Systems arcHItecturE for multi-Layer Dependable solutions (nSHIELD) [28], with the cooperation of major industrial partners in the railway and defense domains, including Ansaldo STS
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