DEFENDER

Defending the European Energy Infrastructures is a research project funded by is a research project funded by the European Comission under the Horizon2020 programme (Call: CIP-2016-2017-1. Topic: CIP-01-2016-2017). Critical Energy infrastructures (CEI) protection and security are becoming of utmost importance in our everyday life. However, cyber and system-theoretic approaches fail to provide appropriate security levels to CEIs, since they are often used in isolation and build on incomplete attack models, resulting in silos-like security management fragmented operational policies. To face these challenges, DEFENDER will (i) model CEIs as distributed Cyber-Physical Systems for managing the potential reciprocal effects of cyber and physical threats (ii) deploy a novel security governance model, which leverages on lifecycle assessment for cost-effective security management over the time (iii) bring people at centre stage by empowering them as virtual sensors for threat detection, as first level emergency responders to attacks, or by considering workforce as potential threats. DEFENDER will adapt, integrate, upscale and validate a number of TRL 4-5 technologies and deploy them within a TRL7 integrated yet adaptable framework for CEI security, resilience and self-healing “by design”, with a view to address, detect, and mitigate cyber-physical threats.

Our role: Participate in defining a dynamic security service level agreement (DS-SLA) concept to mitigate threats and to optimize protection, service restoration and costs. Modeling security threats and defining protective measures. Design and implementation of advanced data processing algorithms for detection, identification and localization of cyber-physical threats based on data from synchrophasor measurement (SPM) units deployed in the energy grid. Pilot demonstration and validation of SPM based threat detection in a real operating environment.