Starting in May 2016, the CIPSEC partners are enrolled in a challenging workplan to make a big impact regarding the protection of critical infrastructures. The CIPSEC Project starts by studying in depth what needs to be protected in critical infrastructures, differentiating between what is domain-specific and the commonalities within a wide plethora of sectors. This yields a valuable input to identify security and privacy threats, and elicit the requirements that the CIPSEC platform must fulfil. This is done with a relevant contribution of the pilot owners, in their role of end-users belonging to three critical domains such as health, transport and environment. The identification of the requirements launches the definition of the platform design, including the building blocks and the needed interfaces among them. Defining a general architecture whose instantiation enables the protection of critical infrastructures of many different sectors, with very different assets to protect and facing diverse security and privacy threats is a key step to validate the design phase. In fact, this architecture has to be directly applied to the three domains of the project in a seamless way to verticals other than those. With this in place, the implementation phase starts in parallel to the setup of the three pilot infrastructures. An integrated early version is then deployed in the three pilots, and then the piloting phase begins. Two more releases are produced in a continuous feedback with the piloting and validation activities.
As cross activities, CIPSEC considers exploitation of results, dissemination, standardization and preliminary certification.
The main milestones foreseen in CIPSEC are the following:
- M6 (October 2016): Study on critical infrastructure security needs concluded and platform requirements elicited"
- M9 (January 2017): Design and definition of general architecture for critical infrastructure protection
- M18 (October 2017): Early platform version and preconfiguration of the pilot infrastructures concluded
- M24 (April 2018): Intermediate platform version and first deployment in the three pilots
- M27 (July 2018): Preliminary setup of the tests concluded
- M32 (December 2018): Prototype demonstration conducted
- M36 (April 2019): Testing and evaluation finished. Final integrated platform. Plans for exploitation defined and consolidated."
