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 DYNABIC partners from industry and academia are investigating software solutions that are primarily intended to strengthen the preparedness of the operators of critical infrastructures. In the event of an imminent cyberattack, these solutions enable a rapid, proactive, and targeted response to avert or mitigate the consequences.

Researcher from the SSE group 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.

Software adaptation is interlinked with the development and operations phases of the software lifecycle. This helps operators to continuously adapt their critical system 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.