Digital infrastructures are seeing convergence and connectivity at unprecedented scale. This is true for both current critical national infrastructures and emerging future systems, e.g., smart cities,
intelligent transportation, high-value manufacturing and Industry 4.0. Cyber security of such ultra-large scale infrastructures faces unprecedented complexity. Diverse legacy and non-legacy software and hardware compose on-the-fly to deliver services to millions of users with varying requirements and unpredictable actions. This complexity is compounded by intricate supply-chains and the need to deliver resilient operations in the presence of untrusted, partially trusted or compromised elements.
The integrated exploration of such ultra-large scale, compositionally secure infrastructures is an imperative need, yet to be comprehensively scoped in the research community. There is an urgent need to pivot our perspective away from piecemeal solutions to one that takes a compositional, adaptive view, anticipating and addressing the security challenges arising from hitherto unprecedented complexity, heterogeneity and connectivity. Furthermore, shifting established research paradigms from an ideal vision of security-by-design to the reality of securing-a compromised-system is imperative.
SCULI will drive this paradigm-shift to predictable security assurances in the presence of uncertainty. This holds the key to addressing the grand challenge of provisioning security at the societal scale—highly interconnected, dynamic, structureless, on-demand systems and services.
SCULI brings together interdisciplinary expertise in cyber security of critical infrastructures, large-scale distributed environments, human-computer interaction in secure systems, and threat analytics coupled with key research facilities (infrastructure testbeds and analytics suites). This synergistic combination and critical mass will deliver rapid advances to address SCULI’s ambitious research objectives.