Developing IT Security Solutions

Network control and secondary technologies form the technical backbone of most critical infrastructures, such as gas and electricity supply. Protection and control devices enable the implementation of switching measures in the grid or monitoring the status of individual plants. Decentralized generation units (e.g. wind, PV, CHP,...) and consumers (e.g. charging infrastructures, heat pumps, storage,...) also require information technologies to realize reliable operation. In addition, there are actors in the energy supply such as virtual power plant operators, which aggregate and control generation plants, storage facilities and loads in the sense of joint electricity marketing. Attacks on energy infrastructures pursue both political (disruption of public order, economic damage to industrial production) and criminal goals (extortion of operators). If electrical infrastructures or plants of are manipulated by criminal external interference, this has immediate serious consequences for everyday life, potentially threatening society as a whole. 

The partners of the Fraunhofer Center Digital Energy offer services in the context of critical energy supply infrastructures for operators, manufacturers and the relevant associations and authorities. In doing so, we bring together know-how of processes and plant engineering in the energy industry with in-depth knowledge of malware analysis, forensics or even the securing of IT systems. Our scalable cyber-physical large-scale laboratory provides a physical representation of the energy infrastructure (primary, secondary, control room, information and communication technology) of today's and tomorrow's power grids and the facilities connected to them. We thus enable you to develop application-oriented technologies and measures for preventing, detecting, and responding to IT attacks and failures, as well as for digitizing the critical infrastructures of cross-sector energy supply. Our services includes among other things:

Determination of future application scenarios and evaluation of areas of attack

• Security analysis of new information technologies for the operation of power systems
• Evaluation of new IT security technologies and their possible applications
• Analysis of cross-stakeholder IT security risks

Evaluation of multi-stage cyber attacks

• Replication of attacks in cyber-physical laboratory environments and scalable simulation environments
• Protocol-compliant communication and integration of real network components and real control systems possible
• Real-time analysis of the impact on subordinate power systems
• Investigation of possible Indicators of Compromise

Benchmarking and further development of attack detection systems

• Integration of attack detection systems in cyber-physical laboratory environments and in scalable co-simulations of process data and energy networks
• Recording and insertion of real-time traffic possible
• Systematic evaluation of replicated attacks and comparison of attack detection systems from different vendors

Impact of reactive measures on cyber attacks

• Testing of different reactive measures in a realistic co-simulation environment
• Impact analysis on the availability of the power system
• Cyber awareness training (e.g. Red-Team / Blue-Team)

Further education offers

• Creation of awareness among operating personnel for the area of OT security beyond pure IT security training courses
• Further training offers for your experts in various topics (e.g. Forensics)