PROCRUSTES in a nutshell

Water infrastructures, are Critical Infrastructures (CIs), essential for human society, life and health. However, like other CIs (e.g. energy or transport networks), they are vulnerable to cyber-physical (CP) threats, including accidental events and deliberate attacks. Such events in water systems may lead to catastrophic consequences that affect society, economy and most importantly, public health. Despite the recent advances in water systems security, further work is required towards a novel risk management framework that efficiently tackles CP threats, strengthen the capacities of water utilities to protect their systems, determines gaps in security technologies and improves risk management approaches and technologies.

PROCRUSTES will address these challenges by developing a strategic risk-assessment framework and an associated toolkit able to analyse and evaluate CP risks (and their combinations) on water CIs and support the choice and evaluation of appropriate risk treatment options. 

The project will:

  • Develop novel concepts and methodologies to assess risk in Cyber-Physical water systems (CPS)
  • Assemble a modelling toolkit for risk analysis and evaluation and develop a stress-testing environment for evaluating the effectiveness of different risk reduction measures.
  • Develop a comprehensive risk reduction measures knowledge base recommending suitable actions to avoid or mitigate the occurrence of risk events for water CIs
  • Integrate the above into a dynamic risk assessment framework able to represent the logic of risk assessment and support the choice of risk treatment options as well as ensure risk contextualization and risk treatment harmonization for physical-cyber threats hazards and their combination.

The PROCRUSTES system will be accessible, as a service, by any water utility, and will be especially useful in the cases of smaller, less technically equipped water utilities, such as municipal water companies (DEYA) in Greece and around Europe that are currently vulnerable to cyber-physical attacks.

A new era

A new era for urban water systems

Assisted by recent technological developments, such as ICT technologies, monitoring systems and automations, water infrastructures have evolved to new, hybrid systems. What we call “cyber-physical systems”.

Vision

Our vision

We aspire to reinforce resilience for both the water sector and the communities against the emerging challenges and to support evidence-based decision making for cyber-physical security of the critical water infrastructures, through state-of-art solutions.

The challenge

The challenge - Critical water infrastructures and cyber physical threats

Increased functionalities of autonomous operations, real-time monitoring and remote-control capabilities are becoming risk sources, exploited by adversaries to disturb or even weaponize water supply. We are compelled to rethink water system resilience and seek for the concepts, methods and tools to design systems that are less vulnerable to cyber-physical threats.

Mission

Our mission

With the application of innovative techniques and advanced technologies, PROCRUSTES aims to support strategic planning for water utilities, as well as to establish and promote adaptive technology platforms and provide state-of-art solutions to decision makers.