[agents] vacancy PhD student on Security, Intelligence, and Smart Energy Systems.

[Han La Poutré]

Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam has a vacancy in the research groups “Intelligent and Autonomous Systems” and “Computer Security” for a highly talented

           PhD student,

           on the subject of Security, Intelligence, and Smart Energy Systems.



Job description:

The energy system is the backbone of modern society: it provides sustainable energy to millions of homes and supports vital sectors and critical applications. Digitalisation paves the way for the energy transition towards carbon neutrality. The physical energy infrastructure is increasingly dependent on Operational Technology (OT) systems for real-time monitoring and control of physical facilities. Opening up the system to everyone by means of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) requires careful considerations with regard to information security. This, combined with the trend towards distributed renewable generation and easy market participation for all energy system participants, makes the cyber security requirements of the system become even more critical.

Cyber resilience is thus emerging as a key topic to ensure security of supply and stable operation of the energy system, as a cyber-physical system (CPS). The energy management systems at control centres are the bottlenecks of the cyber-physical energy system. As already demonstrated before, a cyber attack would cause extensive power outages and cripple the entire energy chain. The project RESCUE develops computational and artificial intelligence-based methods and technologies for incident response to protect utilities from state-sponsored cyber attacks and cyber secure the Control Room of the Future. It improves operational resilience of cyber-physical energy systems to such threats by combining innovative technologies, incident response strategies, and human factors, and by training system operators to deal with the ever-growing cyber threats. RESCUE will thus address three challenges: i) cyber resilience analysis, planning, and operation of integrated CPS, including digital twins ii) incident response to cyber attacks, and iii) knowledge utilisation and transfer via technology demonstration and building human capital for utilities. 

The PhD student will focus on the incident response challenge. This research involves improving cyber security and operational resilience of CPS by developing and demonstrating strategies and tools to defend, prevent, respond, and mitigate cyber attacks. An intrusion detection and prevention system will be developed using deep learning to analyse combined data from digital twin at both cyber layers (i.e., communication network traffic) and physical layers (i.e., CPS measurements). Incident response strategies will be developed; this will be based on developing security models, analysing security games, and designing appropriate strategies. In order to reason about the effect of attacks and defense mechanisms, in particular, intrusion detection with firewalls and transparent human computer interfaces, a mathematical framework/language based on security games is needed that allows analysing false positives and false negatives, characterising containment of the adversarial footprint, and designing and understanding the effect of incidence response mechanisms. Optimisation-based co-learning is used for both the adversary and defender to learn how to react to one another and which actions lead to the best rewards. The research has both a theoretical and systems component and is carried out in cooperation with researchers on the other challenges.

The overall project settings and developments include a Control Room of the Future (CRoF) for utilities at TU Delft, a developing CPS digital twin, and a developing advanced Dutch demonstration and training facility regarding cyber attacks. The incident response solutions developed in this project are implemented in the RESCUE prototype software and demonstrated. 

The project RESCUE is carried out at CWI and TU Delft, together with the partners TenneT TSO, Siemens Netherlands, DNV GL Netherlands, and the European Network for Cyber Security (ENCS) Cooperatief U.A. At TU Delft, two companion PhD students will work in this project, at the departments of Electrical Sustainable Energy (Faculty of EEMCS) and of Multi-Actor Systems (Faculty of TPM), on cyber resilience analysis and on operator behaviour in incident response settings, respectively. The project consists of fundamental research with an eye on applications and develops prototype and demonstrator software. The project RESCUE is funded by NWO (the Dutch Research Council).

For more information about the vacancies, please contact
Prof.dr. Han La Poutré
Tel. +31 (0)20 592 4082
Email: han.la.poutre at cwi.nl
or 
Prof.dr. Marten van Dijk
Tel. +31 (0)20 592 4066
Email: marten.van.dijk at cwi.nl


For application and further information, see:

https://www.cwi.nl/jobs/vacancies/912428


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