Blockchains To Protect UK’s Nuclear Power Plants

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Power plants are some of the most critical bits on infrastructure. An attack against a power plant could incapacitate an entire region of any country. This is doubly true for nuclear power plants. Moreover, an attack against a nuclear power facility could have disastrous consequences, making an area uninhabitable for millennia. With more and more critical systems moving “online” an attack need not be physical to inflict untold damage.

To protect the nation’s nuclear power plants from cyber attacks, the UK government has employed security specialists Guardtime to provide cyber defences. The deal covers flood defences and the electrical grid as well.

Guardtime’s Keyless Signature Infrastructure (KSI) blockchain technology is based on hash-function cryptography. Blockchains were made famous by the digital currency BitCoin, but Guardtime’s usage of the technology predates it. In essence, KSI provides security by distributing data to trusted nodes over private, secure networks of validators.

“We can continuously monitor the integrity of the control platform so that operators who have access to management software see a picture of the system as true and correct against an approved configuration baseline, that there is an absence of compromise or malware in the software applications and configuration data responsible for operations,” said Guardtime CTO, Matthew Johnson.

KSI allows for any bit of data to be signed, and for location, time, and authenticity to be verified independently on any node. This approach closes a highly dangerous avenue of attack, where an attacker could compromise an entire system by injecting a compromised bit of data.