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Business Reporter: Zero Trust innovation for a safer world
Have you ever watched a drone deliver a package or try to navigate through a crowd? Some of the inevitable questions that spring to mind could concern how safe it really is. Are there bad actors out there that can hijack the drone’s flight path or destroy it completely?
Cyber-physical and autonomous systems are increasingly coming under scrutiny. Studies predict that in 20 years they will control the functionality of smart cities – including transportation, communications, utilities and automated building systems. Through networks of billions of connected edge devices, these smart systems will boast the capacity to run the physical world and make independent decisions.
As smart systems become ubiquitous and their influence in impacting the lives of people and the future of cities expands, some concerns emerge. How do we maintain the security and resilience of autonomous systems and protect them from cyber-physical attacks? How do we ensure their safety, to protect the people living in these smart cities?
The Technology Innovation Institute’s (TII) Secure Systems Research Centre (SSRC) is leading a promising approach to creating a framework to understand and defend autonomous systems from security vulnerabilities by mitigating threats. These comprise risks to all types of infrastructure, including fleets of cars and drones, or automated warehouses, as well as construction sites, farms and smart cities.
To achieve this ambitious target, SSRC leverages a Zero Trust approach – never trust and always verify everything. This means building trust from the ground up so that every component in a system is authenticated, and its security and integrity verified.
SSRC combines this Zero Trust approach with domain knowledge and security and resilience technologies, to build secure cyber-physical and autonomous systems. Through its three focus research areas – secure technologies, Zero Trust, and secure mesh shield – SSRC is working to create new technologies, while also designing and analysing methods to enhance end-to-end security and resilience in computing and communication systems.
Through hands-on applications, the centre’s team of researchers and engineers demonstrate the power and scope of its pioneering technologies in real-world scenarios. SSRC also fosters tactile collaborations with like-minded stakeholders to drive transformative technology outcomes. The centre accelerates and expedites these outcomes through multiple synergies with leading industry experts, academic institutions and research organisations across the Middle East, Europe and the Americas.
With the world switching gears from the internet of things to a connected “intelligence of everything”, SSRC ensures that its innovations are designed to reduce security vulnerability and threats in a global community dependent on billions of physical and digital internet touch points – thereby, enabling future growth.
As the applied research pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), TII works at the intersection of discovery science to shape transformative technological innovations that benefit society. Through stimulating a research mindset and culture of exploration, TII reinforces the position of Abu Dhabi and the UAE as a leading R&D hub and a trailblazer in launching breakthrough technology solutions.
Click here to learn more about TII, SSRC, our projects and how they impact our future.
