Zero Trust Innovation for a Safer World
Technology Innovation Institute is a Business Reporter client.
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 concern how safe drones really are. Could bad actors hijack a 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 impact on the lives of people and the future of cities expands, concerns have emerged. 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 Secure Systems Research Centre (SSRC), based in Abu Dhabi, is leading a promising approach to creating a framework to defend autonomous systems from security vulnerabilities and threats. These comprise risks to all types of infrastructure, including fleets of cars and drones, public transportation, automated warehouses, construction sites, farms and smart cities.
To achieve this ambitious target, the 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.
The 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 research focus areas—secure technologies, Zero Trust and secure mesh shield—the SSRC is working to create new technologies and designing methods to enhance end-to-end security and resilience in computing and communication systems.
With hands-on applications, the SSRC’s teams of researchers and engineers demonstrate the power and scope of its pioneering technologies in real-world scenarios, and foster tactile collaborations with like-minded stakeholders to drive transformative technology outcomes. The center accelerates and expedites these outcomes through multiple synergies with leading industry experts, academic institutions and research organizations across the Middle East, Europe and the Americas.
With the world advancing from the Internet of Things to a connected “intelligence of everything,” the SSRC’s innovations are designed to reduce security vulnerabilities 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), the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) works at the intersection of discovery science to shape transformative technological innovations that benefit society. By stimulating a research mindset and a culture of exploration, TII reinforces the position of Abu Dhabi 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.
This article originally appeared in Business Reporter.
Image: iStock id1176054530
