DEFGRID - The Utility DSbD Demonstrator

The UK's Clean Growth Strategy requires all utility companies to deliver a progressive modernisation of Britain's national infrastructure to achieve net-zero by 2050\. This will be achieved through the adoption of smart technologies (IoT), embedded intelligence and cyber resilience technologies, which the government estimates will result in operational performance savings of between £17bn and £40bn by 2050\. With the anticipated growth of connected smart technologies in the sector it poses an increased risk and the consequences of a cyber-attack, such as the one witnessed in May 2021 on the US Colonial Pipeline, could become much more frequent. If this risk is ignored, it could lead to increases in unintended behaviour such as denials of service or code execution/injection, which could cause major economic and social impact in the UK's critical services Utility sector. This project seeks to deliver an IIoT demonstrator in the utility industry, which sees the use of DSbD technologies to deliver an enhanced security solution for applicability within SGN critical national infrastructure. The Morello board will be used to run the partner's existing industry open-source software application, focused on application level cyber security, and process automation and control. The demonstrator will be developed to align to industry requirements and understand how the Morello hardware platform can be deployed into the real-world physical demonstrator on a SGN facility. The project will run over 36 months and will include the demonstration and validation of the combined software solution at a utility-scale test environment (the Power Networks Demonstration Centre), in parallel to deploying a physical test reference demonstrators based on an SGN facilities. The partnership has existing, established relationships within the utility sector and supply chain, which they will fully utilise to exploit the project results through a variety of technology and research providers, thereby maximising the impact and security capability of the developed DSbD hardware across a number of critical service sectors, such as electricity, gas and water. Learning outcomes will be the financial and social impact of the reduction in cyber risk and the increased digital transformation capabilities within the utility sector, and an assessment of the integration process of an existing solution onto DSbD technology, such that the industry benefits can be leveraged, without compromising the operational availability. To ultimately foster trust in cyber security technology, it is essential that future digital services meet critical national infrastructure standards and requirements, and the DEFGRID demonstrator will allow those capabilities to be showcased.