POSEIDON: Comprehensive Cybersecurity in Water Cycle Management

1 day ago

The water sector faces significant challenges from increasing digitalization and automation, which, while essential for efficient management, contrast with a shortage of skill staff and limited technological investment. This combination of factors makes infrastructures highly vulnerable to cyberthreats, putting both water quality and continuity of supply at risk.

In response to these needs, and answering to INCIBE’s Challenge 23, the POSEIDON project has emerged, offering a comprehensive cybersecurity platform that combines advanced analysis of processes and communications with artificial intelligence. This non-intrusive solution allows detect and prevent cyberthreats, ensuring the operability and security of water cycle in an increasing complex and connected environment.

What is POSEIDON?

POSEIDON is a comprehensive cybersecurity platform specifically designed to protect critical infrastructure in water sector. POSEIDON keeps a non-intrusive approach that allows for the integration of cybersecurity without disruption existing systems.

Bases on advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, POSEIDON combines the analysis of operational processes with communication monitoring to ensure complete protection.

The main objective of POSEIDON is offering a solution that centralizes the monitoring both security and operational processes in a single panel. This 360º vision of the system allows data correlation, incidents detection and more efficient threats management ensuring the continuity and quality of service.

Key Components of POSEIDON

The architecture of POSEIDON is based on two fundamental pillars:

CARMEN (Collector of Smart Metrics): It is a platform developed by TECDESOFT, designed for the comprehensive management of water cycle. CARMEN centralizes information of processes variables, integrating data from instrumented and automated systems.Provides a unified and detailed view of critical variables, essential to guarantee the water quality, and facilitates the correlation between security and operational aspects, improving the capacity to respond to incidents and optimizing management processes.
SANTI y SANTI.IA The Security and Network Threat Analysis in Industry and Artificial Intelligence in Security and Network Threat Analysis in Industry respectively. Both are advanced cybersecurity platforms for OT and/or industrial network, which together implement the InprOTech Guardian service, a technological asset developed and designed by INPROTECH.

Why InprOTech Guardian

InprOTech Guardian is a cybersecurity tool specifically designed and developed to protect industrial networks. Its main objective is monitoring the traffic generated in production environments and analyse it based on a combination of static, community and AI-powered rules. This approach makes it possible to effectively identify threats and issue alerts in real time, directly notifying plant managers and/or operators of possible attacks or operational failures, enabling them to anticipate and reduce their impact.

As mentioned in previous sections, InprOTech Guardian implements two proprietary technologies, SANTI and SANTI.IA. While SANTI uses static rules for intrusion and threat detection, SANTI.IA incorporates Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence algorithms and technology to dynamically adapt to complex behavioural patterns.

These technologies analyse network traffic in real time, can detect anomalous behaviour and identify threats and provide early warnings, improving the ability to prevent cyberattacks.

The integration of CARMAN, SANTI and SANTI.IA (Guardian) technologies forms a robust and proactive platform, capable of ensuring operational and cyber security in water cycle. This synergy enables comprehensive protection, combining advanced monitoring, early threat detection and process optimization.

The POSEIDON Innovation

POSEIDÓN id characterized by its innovative approach that integrates the simultaneous analysis of the communications and operational processes contexts from a cybersecurity perspective.

Thanks to advanced artificial intelligence models, POSEIDON identifies anomalous patterns in complex scenarios combining processes and communications. This significantly improves the early threats detection and the ability to issue preventive alerts.

The POSEIDON innovation is rigorously tested on the MEDUSA simulator platform, which replicates real urban water supply conditions. This environment ensures that the developed solutions are highly functional and ready for implementation in real water sector operations.

Benefits

The implementation of POSEIDON not only addresses the cybersecurity challenges, also brings tangible benefits that transforms the management of the water cycle:

Visibility and control: Real-time monitoring of processes and services brings to operators a complete understanding of the system.
Proactive threats managements: By reducing detection and reaction times, POSEIDON reduces operational risks and ensures the service continuity.
Compliance: The platform aligns with industry cybersecurity standards and regulations, helping organizations to comply with legal requirements strengthening their position in the face of audits and regulations.
Resources optimization: POSEIDON combines the process automation with cybersecurity monitoring, all in one integrated system, which allows both aspects to be managed simultaneously, without the need to increase costs or make major changes to existing infrastructure, achieving greater efficiency and profitability.

Summary

POSEIDON is the end-to-end solution that transforms water cycle management, combining advanced cyber protection with operational control in a single platform. With features such as early threats detection, real-time monitoring and smart data analysis, POSEIDON not only ensures the continuity and quality of water supply, also optimizes resources and reduces operational risks.

Designed to respond to specific challenges of sector, POSEIDON integrates technological innovation with a practical approach, providing a powerful tool to address an increasing digitalized and vulnerable environment.