CyberSEAS advanced the state of the art of protection technologies with several important contributions, specifically tailored to resilience improvement of complex EPES infrastructures.
With respect to risk assessment, the project developed tools with advanced features for: (i) vulnerability assessment; (ii) cost-benefit analysis; (iii) integrated risk assessment governance; and (iv) support for decision-making on cost-effective investments and implementation of security measures. The new tools provide a unified view of security and safety, which is a very much lacking feature of current offerings.
Major contributions were made in the field of Real Time Data collection and Security Monitoring. The project developed a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) + Security Operations Center (SOC) solution which brings a significant advancement in real-time security and dependability monitoring technologies, and in particular: 1) It extends SIEM and other security and dependability monitoring technologies from the infrastructure domain, where it is mostly confined today, to a multi-domain view and high-level processes and services in order to perform security-related event processing and monitoring at the service level; 2) It extends the evaluation and correlation capabilities of real time security monitoring systems.
As to secure deployment approaches, the project has advanced the SOTA of secure development and deployment support for Trusted Computing (TC), and particularly, Trusted Execution (TE). What makes CyberSEAS solutions extremely attractive is their ability to protect against attackers with high privileges. CyberSEAS solutions make the superior security features of TE technologies seamlessly available to EPES operators, by integrating them in “core-side” components.
CyberSEAS has advanced the SOTA in the fields of Certification, Governance, and Cooperation support. As to Governance and Cooperation, it has developed new features which propagate information about detected threats and alerts and make them available to a wide community of cooperating partners (e.g. the EU wide MeliCERTes platform), thus enabling coordinated handling of hazardous events. As to Certification, the project has defined a novel methodological framework which can be used in practice as a reference for certifying a wide class of emerging critical systems, virtually any system for which: (i) the general architecture has already been designed, (ii) business constraints impose that (radical) changes to the architecture be avoided, and (iii) the main COTS components that must be integrated have already been chosen.
CyberSEAS solutions increase the resilience against different levels of cyber and privacy attacks and data breaches - including personal data breaches - in the energy sector, by delivering an ecosystem of security measures focused on the protection against cyber-threats which have the highest impact on business continuity and consumers’ privacy. Cyber protection is delivered at different levels, and precisely: i) At the supply chain level, across all EPES actors involved; ii) At cross sectorial level, considering potential cascading effects; and iii) At all phases of targeted cyber-attacks related to complex attack campaigns.
Protection requires huge investments and resources to be put forward by governments and organizations, posing a strong burden especially in a historical time of economic crisis. By deploying CyberSEAS solutions, not only organizations reduce the likelihood of a successful Social Engineering attack which can cause significant costs in terms of loss of business and/or reputation, but they also implement effective mitigation measures.