SBIR Phase II: SUNIGate: Secure Universal and Intelligent Data Gateway

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is in enhancing and advancing the U.S. critical infrastructure security by improving the capabilities to detect, mitigate and respond to anomalous events such as cyberattacks using fast and low complexity strategies. This will have widespread applications in monitoring and control of many critical infrastructure applications such as electricity/water utilities, oil, gas, office buildings, and industrial facilities.

This solution will enable situational awareness for critical infrastructure operators and energy managers, and provide real-time defense against cyberattacks, reducing the loss or misuse of electricity to critical users such as hospitals, saving billions of dollars for the public and private organizations. In addition, protecting energy assets such as renewable energy resources will ensure security and trust in emerging sustainable technologies.

This in turn will lead to high-impact innovation and workforce development in a variety of critical fields such as IoT networks, anomaly detection, communication networks, security of embedded devices, and cloud-based applications.

The proposed project will reduce the risk and impacts of cyberattacks as more intelligent devices interface with critical infrastructure. In this phase, the proposed project will improve, test, and validate the prototype developed during Phase I. This novel technology utilizes flexible, low-cost, and low-power embedded computers to collect data from a large variety of field devices and transmit secured replicated data over different communication media providing multiple and secure redundant communication paths/media.

Within the solution framework, cybersecurity algorithms will process the replicated signals to detect and remove malicious data. This Phase II project will perform extensive testing of the different hardware and software components to enhance their design. Furthermore, marketing and sales plans will be developed to establish a product roadmap to take the technology to the market.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.