Simulation based evaluation of security and resilience in railway infrastructure

Autonomous and connected vehicle technologies are rapidly emerging in the modern railway domain. Traditional standalone systems are now becoming more sophisticated, resulting in more distributed interfaces, and a larger attack surface. As such, there now exists a tightly coupled cyber-physical nature that makes a cyber-attack capable of not only exfiltrating sensitive data, but also manipulating safety-critical operations of the system. This manipulation can cause the train to experience unsafe conditions, potentially leading to derailments, explosions, and collisions. This makes it as important as ever to build in security and resilience at the earliest stages of design, making deployment infrastructure more safe, reliable, and predictable in a compromising environment. In this poster we demonstrate how to analyze the security and resilience of railway infrastructure by utilizing a domain specific simlation based framework. Our framework includes a simulation cluster with both transportation and network modeling capabilities, a graphical design studio to rapidly develop attack scenarios againt railway networks, and a results dashboard that includes real time visualization of various metrics. Additionally, we not only support software-in-the-loop, but have integrated a hardware-in-the-loop testbed to test realistic attacks that occur within the deployment environment. We illustrate the capabilities of our developed framework with a connected railway case study of the Washington D.C Metro rail network.