ThreatSense: Nuclear I&C Cyber Risk
BlueRISC’s Nuclear Instrumentation and Control (I&C) ThreatSense is an AI-driven cyber-threat risk analysis toolkit for Nuclear I&C Systems. It addresses the unique requirements in Safety and Operational I&C systems toward mitigating advanced cyber threats, such as APTs. An evaluation console provides probabilistic metrics and actionable insights for understanding the cyber-risk posture across physical, cyber, and compliance dimensions – both at design-time and in deployed use-cases.
ThreatSense’s modeling framework is capable of capturing the requirements of Nuclear Safety and Operational I&C systems including redundancy and diversity. It enables comprehensive system modeling with support for all components such as PLCs, RTUs, FPGAs, HMIs, networking devices, and sensor-actuator ecosystems, as well as their connectivity and security levels. The model insertion is a one-time action and the associated AI/ML components are automatically generated for the inserted use-case.
ThreatSense’s AI/ML engine is based on advanced Bayesian Networks which can provide quantifiable probabilistic metrics for understanding the cyber-risk. It supports evaluating advanced threats and wargaming, where it can be configured for a variety of sophisticated analysis tasks including coordinated Multi-stage attacks, Advanced Persistent Threats, Malware, Exploits and Insider Threats. The evaluation console provides probabilistic metrics including Maintenance/Upgrade Impact Assessment, Consequence of Compromise, and others. Example consequences of compromise include Safe Shutdown, Unnecessary Shutdown, Loss of Coolant Accident, Control Rod Ejection, Core Damage, etc. ThreatSense supports Gen 2 and 3 reactors and can be extended to future Gen 4 reactors. It can be utilized in Industrial Control Systems (ICSs) and cyber-physical systems in general.