Mission Unbreakable

In order to truly create an unbreakable world, a new approach to cybersecurity is needed. Oftentimes, we think that a system will be safe if we independently secure all the disconnected pieces. This mission set out to take a view of complex industrial systems as exactly that: interconnected and interrelated networks of machines and bits with a broad attack surface, rather than looking at each piece separately. The belief is that by starting with this as a given, new models can emerge where the system makes itself inherently more secure than the security of the pieces because it is connected, rather than treat connectivity as if it can only increase risk can it be the basis for greater security. There is some evidence that this can be true both in cyber and physical systems. As examples, Blockchain technology improves the security of distributed ledgers through interconnected nodes, and Digital Ghost uses the fact that systems are interdependent through physics to improve the security of a power plant.

Translating this broad thought to tactical demonstrations made for an exciting mission where each visit with the team was a new experience, truly exploring novel ways to think about how to make our world more secure against cyber, physical, and social threats. Technologically, demonstrations spanned from new capability enabled through additive manufacturing, remote sensing, digital trust architectures, and embedded security (to name a few). In parallel, the team grew a passion around the future of Quantum Computing, and focused the later part of the year on how to translate the associated hype and long-term vision to a roadmap of near-term utility.

Key demonstrations/milestones:

• January 2018 : Trusted Part demo: Leveraging multiple techniques, the team showed concepts on how to add intelligence to otherwise “dumb and passive” metal. This included showing “internally tattooed” parts containing unique marker built internally while being printed additively; infusing ions into the part’s surface to give it a material barcode; and adding passive sensors that can give feedback on a part’s utilization.
• June 2018 : . The team built a custom touch-table that interacted with functional wind-turbine models to demonstrate both the vulnerabilities at a wind farm and system-wide set of security solutions to address vulnerabilities across cyber, physical, and social interfaces.
• October 2018: Forge goes Quantum! Initial runs of simplified industrial algorithms (wind farm performance and logistics optimizations being the first two examples) on the D-Wave Quantum Annealing architecture.