Secure the Railway IT Infrastructure

Project Summary:

Investigators at GMU will lead a research and planning effort focused on addressing critical infrastructure security issues in the nation’s railway communications and signaling infrastructure. The nation’s railway communications infrastructure is highly distributed and was never designed with signals security as a primary goal, with most protocols relying security through obscurity. GMU and Dartmouth College will work together to identify a research roadmap for problems in this space, propose novel and practical solutions to these problems, understand the public policy implications of our research and proposed solutions, and identify and solicit additional team members from I3P institutions in order to smoothly transition our research to the public domain, railways, and their equipment vendors. Independent of the efforts funded under this specific award, Dartmouth and GMU will seek to submit competitive funding proposals to the upcoming NSF Cyber-Physical systems solicitation and the standing FRA BAA. We believe that our team building efforts under this I3P award can complement and enhance these prior planned activities.

• Principal Investigator: Massimiliano Pala, Department of Computer Science
• Project Researchers
• Funding: The Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection (I3P)