The National Satellite of Excellence (NSoE) in Design Science and Technology for Secure Critical Infrastructure (DeST-SCI) is a CSA-supported programme focusing on advancing the state of the art and state of practice in the design of secure and safe critical infrastructure. Research in NSoE–DeST-SCI is aimed at creating advanced anomaly detection systems, methods and tools for avoiding anomalies, digital twins for water and power systems, methods for attack response and rapid recovery, detection of code replacement in controllers, and control models using machine learning techniques for reconfigurable control.

Research in NSoE–DeST-SCI makes use of the design of critical infrastructure as well as data generated from operational systems to create state of the art methods and tools. While design centric approaches focus on, for example, the generation of process anomaly detectors using design diagrams, the data centric approaches make use of data collected from operational plants. The design and data centric approaches are integrated in novel ways never tried before in the critical infrastructure security community. Prototypes and algorithms are tested in the testbeds available in iTrust and in simulators such as the Digital Twin and publicly available electric power simulators.