UK uses blockchain to protect nuclear facilities from cyberattacks

     Security specialist Guardtime has been commissioned to protect the UK’s nuclear power plants, flood defences and electricity grid from cyberattacks using its hash-based cryptography Keyless Signature Infrastructure (KSI) blockchain technology.

     The UK Infrastructure Agreement is a collaboration with Future Cities Catapult, a leading UK-based organisation focused on smart city innovation.

     The blockchain system can avoid attacks on a single node through distributed persistent data nodes in a trustless environment. It can create a private network through verification, or it can form a completely public network through many public nodes like Bitcoin.

     Guardtime has developed secure network solutions such as blockchain. Some of the company's cybersecurity experts have backgrounds in the US military, while others are Estonian technology innovators.

     Guardtime Chief Technology Officer Matthew Johnson said these industrial applications enable nuclear power systems and subsystems to maintain integrity and ensure management and control of platforms and networks.

Johnson told reporters:

     “We can continuously monitor the integrity of the platform, giving operators with administrative access to software a real-time view of the system and the ability to correct unapproved configuration changes, ensuring no malware is running in the application and that configured data is being used responsibly.”

     He said the technology was primarily designed to prevent what happened in Natanz, Iran, from affecting Britain.

     Stuxnet was first detected in June 2010 and was the first "worm" virus specifically designed to attack real-world infrastructure (energy) facilities, such as nuclear power plants, dams, and national power grids. Internet security experts are concerned about this.

     On December 15, 2010, a senior German computer consultant said that the Stuxnet computer virus set back Tehran's nuclear program by two years. The malware repeatedly targeted Iran's nuclear facilities in 2010, causing damage by infiltrating the Windows operating system and reprogramming it.

     Guardtime has created a Keyless Signature Infrastructure (KSI) that will be built into an industrial-grade blockchain, which will allow any or all data within the system to be signed and its authenticity to be independently verified at any time, place, and in history.

Dr Catherine Mulligan, head of digital strategy and economics at Future Cities Catapult, said in a statement:

“Guardtime’s unique permissioned blockchain, which enables large-scale system integrity, has huge potential to improve the security of the UK’s core infrastructure and will form an important part of the government’s industrial strategy, demonstrating to the world how cities can become ‘smarter’ in the future.”