Secure I&C Communications in Nuclear Energy Systems

In next generation power plants, wireless sensor data security is of utmost importance. Protecting information is a challenge as data encryption and authentication algorithms are difficult with limited computational capability and resources at sensor nodes. Key management is a serious limitation in all encryption and authentication approaches including the Advanced Encryption Standard. Also, the limited channel bandwidth is yet another challenge for cryptographic systems employed. The computation and communication overhead increase with large number of nodes and so does authentication requests times, and the security of low-power AES protocol is not solved for sensor networks. Therefore, there is a need in developing stronger authentication methods for sensor networks, while making sure the cost of the proposed technology is a low-cost option. This SBIR will developand demonstrate a new capability in cyber security for sensor monitoring to counteract potential cyberattacks on nuclear energy systems. The new approach is a generalization that incorporates two independent physical layers of communications (RF and acoustics). This method can be broadly viewed as a multi-factor authentication technique in data monitoring involving digital instrumentation and control systems in nuclear energy facilities, such as nuclear power plants. One of the main objectives of this project would be to develop and demonstrate a novel secure wireless technology architecture addressing the key management problem that all encryption and data authentication methods encounters. The proposed dual channel, RF and acoustics, will enable the use of advanced sensors, actuators, and control unit architectures to achieve extreme high resiliency to cyberattacks. The public benefits from a successful execution of this project can indeed be significant for a number of item and process monitoring problems in NPPs, and prevention of cyber-physical attacks. There are innumerable commercial applications that can benefit from this work, and the use of this ultra-secure data encryption and authentication system in a wireless framework is of interest to multiple government agencies and programs. The enabling technology resulting from this project will allow widespread acceptance of smart critical infrastructures (not limited to nuclear power plant monitoring) such as monitoring in plants and other urban infrastructure monitoring applications. We also expect a version of the capabilities developed in this work to be beneficial in similar commercial applications and sensor data problems that involves RFID. The long- range passive RFID/sensor market is many hundreds of million-dollar industryworldwide, hence acceptance of the product of this project is expected to generate significant revenue for US commerce.