SPD-Safe: Secure Administration of Railway Intelligent Transportation Systems

Abstract

The railway transport system is critical infrastructure that is exposed to numerous man-made and natural threats, thus protecting this physical asset is imperative. Cyber security, privacy, and dependability (SPD) are also important, as the railway operation relies on cyber-physical systems (CPS) systems. This work presents SPD-Safe—an administration framework for railway CPS, leveraging artificial intelligence for monitoring and managing the system in real-time. The network layer protections integrated provide the core security properties of confidentiality, integrity, and authentication, along with energy-aware secure routing and authorization. The effectiveness in mitigating attacks and the efficiency under normal operation are assessed through simulations with the average delay in real equipment being 0.2–0.6 s. SPD metrics are incorporated together with safety semantics for the application environment. Considering an intelligent transportation scenario, SPD-Safe is deployed on railway critical infrastructure, safeguarding one outdoor setting on the railway’s tracks and one in-carriage setting on a freight train that contains dangerous cargo. As demonstrated, SPD-Safe provides higher security and scalability, while enhancing safety response procedures. Nonetheless, emergence response operations require a seamless interoperation of the railway system with emergency authorities’ equipment (e.g., drones). Therefore, a secure integration with external systems is considered as future work.

A review on cybersecurity in railways

“…For secure railway freight train on-board network, researchers have proposed a lightweight authentication protocol 39 and verified its security by using a compiler namely, Casper and FDR. 40 In addition to this, researchers have also proposed network layer security by using JADE framework 41,42 and SecRoute 43 for railway track and freight train as a case study. Next, researchers have integrated attack tree and fault tree methods to attack-fault tree, as a method of risk analysis for safety and cybersecurity for train braking system.…”

Information Security and Privacy in Railway Transportation: A Systematic Review

“…Moreover, the detection of dangerous situations at railway crossing in real-time was performed using accelerated image processing techniques and deep neural networks. Additionally, leveraging AI techniques in cyber-physical systems (CPS), i.e., interconnected software components operating on different scales and devices, the work in [ 25 ] presents an administration framework to protect cybersecurity, privacy, and dependability in railways. The framework aims at monitoring and managing real-time CPS by integrating an innovative secure routing protocol with a policy-based authorisation features covering confidentiality, integrity, and authentication.…”

Advances in Public Transport Platform for the Development of Sustainability Cities

“…Other topics included in this special issue are energy consumption forecasting in sustainable cities [10] as well as the analysis of energy trading and the development of a trust model [11]. Security is also an important issue within public transpormation, in reference [12] the secure management of railway transportation systems has been analyzed. Finally, analytical models using Machine Learning and Deep Learning have been explored as part of this special issue [13,14].…”