Associate team presentation

NSSICS is an associate team between Inria RESIST research group in France, the University of Abomey-Calavi (UAC) and Centre d’Excellence Africain en Sciences Mathématiques, Informatique et Applications (CEA SMIA) in Benin. The focus on the associate team is to address the problems of securing industrial control systems using machine learning (ML) techniques and software-defined networking (SDN). The work focuses on the development of new techniques for detecting complex attacks, the automated generation of security policies and the orchestration of these policies for their effective deployment. These new techniques must also respect the operational constraints of these critical systems

Electrical grids in Benin will be the use case for applying the results of the project and will allow us to evaluate the impact of the solutions that will be developed through this research project. We expect to have real experimental data from this network to train our Machine Learning models and also to evaluate their performance.

Research directions

• Advanced threat detection: develop methods and algorithms to enhance the detec- tion of cyber threats within ICS systems by using Machine Learning (ML) techniques to infer their expected behaviors and identify any variations accurately.
• Dynamic security policies: investigate approaches to enable the automated generation of security policies that can adapt to the evolution of cyber threats and system conditions while maintaining the operational integrity of the infrastructure.
• Orchestration of security measures for distributed and collaborative ICS architecture: develop techniques and methods for the enforcement of security policies in a dynamic way to meet the challenges of distributed ICS architectures.