Project Summary

This project will demonstrate a solution for secure maintenance operations capable of integration with legacy and new railway vehicles, to protect the integrity and reliability of rail passenger services.

Project Achievements

Activities We demonstrated and validated the solution against three safety related application controls using Birmingham Centre for Rail Research and Education cyber labs. The solution was deployed using virtual machines and RazorSecure’s Security Gateway platform. Data was collected via an industry survey, advisory board and site visits across rolling stock leasers, rail and freight operator depots and manufacturers. All results are publicly available through Railway Industry Association, Rail Delivery Group Board and Rail Safety and Standards Board etc. Our project manager has been nominated for two awards for deaf awareness implementation in the project.

Conclusions

There is deep variation in digital maintenance practices, and security vulnerabilities in existing processes and hardware are common. This makes asset management and audit challenging and has the potential to risk unsafe operational conditions. Remote secure access through one system with checks and balances on user access, asset ID and tasks can be achieved using existing infrastructure and our proof of concept. This has the potential to be deployed wherever network or remote access connectivity is available.

Next Steps

The commercial potential of our proof of concept has been recognised across RazorSecure’s global operations, and proposals for in-situ trials have been made in the EU and US. BCRRE are committed to further work, other partners will be invited to contribute to next stage development with a total potential market sales to £4 million by end 2023. Product alignment with emerging US and EU NIS2 regulations and standards is informing our next stage of development.