Cyber resilient energy systems

Industry 4.0 UQ Energy TestLab will encompass cyber automation for critical infrastructure and energy experimentation.

Cyber Resilience

Led by Professor Ryan Ko and the ITEE Cyber Security research group, the lab's focus is on experiments on cyber automation for critical infrastructure and dataset generation for security analytics research.

Besides the energy critical infrastructure equipment, the lab has a series of industrial control systems (ICS) security cases and scenarios representing advanced manufacturing, food and beverage production, energy generation and consumption, utilities, oil and gas sectors to experiment with.

An example of a scenario could be a manufacturing conveyor belt plant which receives energy from a wind turbine plant. To represent this scenario, we equipped an InTouch primary I/O server, a Human Machine Interface (HMI) with two PLCs (Allen Bradley CompactLogix 5370, Schneider Modicon M580) networked by two Weidmuller unmanaged Ethernet switches. Additionally, to simulate a realistic ICS network, a pfSense firewall is installed on a commercial system board.

In collaboration with Data61, our researchers are currently collecting representative ICS security datasets for critical infrastructure research.

    
Overview of InTouch interface (L: conveyor belt; R: wind turbine) for our cyber security scenario simulation