Publications

The Advanced Reactor Cyber Analysis and Development Environment (ARCADE) simplifies the evaluation and assessment of robustness factor and cyber resilience that support secure-by-design for advanced reactor nuclear power plants. In this manner, ARCADE supports risk-informed performance based (RIPB) evaluations of cybersecurity through its integration of plant physics with high-fidelity emulations of control systems. This cross domain approach enables comprehensive analysis of control system sensitivities, cyber-attack scenarios, and their consequences. ARCADE has been custom developed to meet the demands identified in Tier 1 of the Tiered Cyber Analysis (TCA) as outlined in NRC Draft Regulation Guide (RG) 5.96, which provides a RIPB cybersecurity approach for new reactors.

In today's communication landscape there are multiple technologies and protocols used for communication between end devices. Within security paradigms for these protocols, integrity management is a common goal of system designers. Communication protocols focused on maintaining message integrity can provide assurance that some received data has not been altered or tampered with. While integrity is often coupled with confidentiality in protocol design, this analysis focuses on an evaluation of only integrity protocols. This work outlines various ways message integrity may be preserved with respect to high performance operational technology (OT) systems. It describes a series of experiments and an evaluation framework used to evaluate the performance of the identified integrity approaches regarding common system design goals. Finally, it addresses the testing environment utilized and closes the work with a summary of experimental results.

​Protocols play an essential role in Advance Reactor systems. A diverse set of protocols are available to these reactors. Advanced Reactors benefit from technologies that can minimize their resource utilization and costs. Evaluation frameworks are often used when assessing protocols and processes related to cryptographic security systems. The following report discusses the various characteristics associated with these protocol evaluation frameworks, and derives a novel evaluative framework.

Abstract not provided.

Significant research and development efforts are underway to ensure the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure and other operational technology (OT) systems. Given the high demand for safety and availability of OT systems, novel OT tools and systems must be designed and tested in a consequence-aware environment. This requires the seamless integration of high-fidelity physics simulations with emulations of OT devices and networks. This paper introduces a modular simulation environment for an oil and gas compressor station and its local networks. This environment will be used to support the development of novel tools to predict, detect, and mitigate cyber threats on critical infrastructure. This paper also describes future plans to expand the scale of the environment and its use cases.