Critical infrastructures are vital to our highly developed society. Failures of the energy, water or food supply networks, internet outages, disruptions in healthcare systems or a collapse of the financial sector can have fatal consequences. Hence, they are an attractive target for malicious actors, who, thanks to advanced digitization, are finding ever new ways to exploit vulnerabilities of critical infrastructures.

With the goal of strengthening the cyber-resilience of critical infrastructures, the paluno working group of Prof. Dr. Klaus Pohl is participating in the DYNABIC project that was launched in December 2022. Together with European partners from industry and academia, paluno researchers are investigating software solutions that are primarily intended to strengthen the preparedness of the operators of critical infrastructures. Prof. Dr. Andreas Metzger, project leader for paluno, explains why: “In the event of an imminent cyber-attack, a fast, proactive and targeted response is crucial to avert or mitigate consequences.”

The paluno researchers will use advanced AI methods, such as Reinforcement Learning and Explainable AI, to detect anomalies early on and to suggest software adaptations for protecting the critical systems. “Computer-generated explanations will make feasible adaptations and their effects more comprehensible to operators, thereby facilitating human-in-the-loop decision making” says Prof. Metzger.

Software adaptation is interlinked with the development and operations phases of the software lifecycle. This helps operators to continuously adapt their critical systems to potential attacks, ultimately contributing to business continuity. The DYNABIC solutions will be deployed and validated in use cases covering healthcare, power grid, 5G networks and traffic control.

*DYNABIC: Dynamic business continuity of critical infrastructures on top of adaptive multi-level cybersecurity (Project information: https://sse.uni-due.de/en/research/projects/dynabic)