Two projects led by IFCYBER researchers have received competitive funding from UNSW’s newly established Centre for Critical Digital Infrastructure (CCDI). CCDI’s mission is to secure the smart, efficient, secure, and resilient future of critical digital infrastructure in Australia through the development of technology, partnerships, and proven capabilities.
Project 1 – $50,000 - Investigators: Dr Arash Shaghaghi, Prof Sanjay Jha, Mr Simon Finn (Cisco)
IoT can have environments with devices, users, and applications from different application domains. These environments tend to be heterogeneous, as each application can have different purposes. Context awareness enables IoT deployments to have a common view of the context information and facilitates interoperability, management, and reduction of processing efforts. Hence, the efficient, secure, and privacy-preserving storage and sharing of context information is essential for IoT deployments. This project involves close collaboration with Cisco, laying the foundation for a long-term project that aims to develop practical solutions enabling the secure, efficient, and smart adoption of IoT systems in Australia’s critical infrastructure.
Project 2 – $32,000 – Investigators: Dr Jawad Ahmed, Dr Nadeem Ahmed, and Prof Sanjay Jha
IEEE 2030.5 is fast evolving as the standard communication protocol for scalable and efficient energy management supporting DER in critical infrastructure. The IEEE 2030.5 protocol is used to communicate between Distributed Energy Resources (DER) end devices and the utility-level energy management system. The IEEE 2030.5 server code is not yet publicly available. This project aims to provide the open-source implementation of IEEE2030.5 server and client codes in the RUST language. We pick RUST language to ensure high performance while processing large amounts of data. It has an effective compiler that supports concurrent programming. The availability of the open-source IEEE 2030.5 implementation will enable stakeholders/researchers to incorporate this communication protocol in their setup by first testing their network architecture in a simulated/emulated environment to assess their security posture before changes in the production environment. One use case includes testing public key infrastructure (PKI) in DER using IEEE 2030.5 server and client implementations.