News
Seven partners set to deliver new Shift2Rail ‘4SECURail’ project for railway cybersecurity and safety
February 2020 by Marc Jacob
A consortium of seven European specialist partners from Spain, Italy, The Netherlands and France has been selected to deliver a new EU Shift2Rail Programme funded through Horizon 2020.
Started in December 2019 and officially launched in Barcelona in January 2020, 4SECURail is co-ordinated by engineering consulting firm Ardanuy Ingeniería, S.A., in collaboration with CNR, FIT, Hit Rail, SIRTI, Tree Technology and UIC.
The 4SECURail consortium will deliver a co-designed collaborative process and tools for the coordination of cybersecurity response across European railways, as well as a Formal Methods Demonstrator to support better interoperability of signalling systems for railway security, safety and efficiency.
Hit Rail B.V., the European rail industry’s IT specialist, will work alongside partners UIC (International Union of Railways) and Tree Technology an R&D company to deliver the co-design and testing of a model and collaboration platform for a European Railway Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT), designed to coordinate the Cyber Security response actions of the separate railway security teams. The CSIRT will extend that collaboration and will be demonstrated and tested in 2020/2021 to support future consideration of the feasibility of deployment by the Shift2Rail Joint Undertaking and its work in X2RAIL3 supporting the EU Rail ISAC and Rail Community.
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) will work, alongside Ardanuy, FIT Consulting and SIRTI, to provide a demonstrator for the evaluation, in terms of cost, benefits and required learning curve, of the impact of the use of Formal Methods for the rigorous specification of the components of a railway signalling infrastructure. This is of particular interest to railway Infrastructure Managers, since only cost-effective and precise specification methodologies allow improvement in the dependability of the subsystems developed by different suppliers.
Shift2Rail is a European rail initiative that seeks to encourage focused Research and Innovation (R&I) aimed at integrating new and advanced technologies through its Horizon 2020 funding and aimed at completing the Single European Railway Area (SERA). The 4SECURail project, started in December 2019 and officially launched in January 2020, will contribute to ensuring correct behaviour, interoperability and safety for signalling systems, along with measures to deploy collaborative Cyber Security support across Europe.
This project has received funding from the Shift2Rail JU under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under Grant Agreement 881775.
