SCULI - Securing Convergent Ultra-large Scale Infrastructures

The SCULI (Securing Convergent Ultra-large Scale Infrastructures) programme, led by the University of Bristol, brings together experts from the Department of Computer Science, alongside counterparts at the Universities of Bristol and Lancaster, who will work across industry, policy and beyond, to forge a pioneering new approach to delivering cybersecurity. 

The UK is the third most targeted country in the world for cyber-attacks, after the US and Ukraine, according to the House of Commons inquiry into Cyber Resilience of UK’s Critical National Infrastructure. From smart buildings, connected cities, smart farming and critical national infrastructure, the pace of change in digital technologies is increasing and so too is society’s dependence on them. As this increases, so does the risk of cyber-attacks and large-scale disruptions to essential infrastructure. 

The SCULI programme draws on a unique mix of expertise - spanning sociotechnical approaches, and theoretical and applied computer science - and state-of-the-art lab facilities. It aims to transform the conceptualisation and delivery of cybersecurity in a world where connectivity has reached an unprecedented scale, with a prevalence of legacy and non-legacy systems, complex technology stacks and supply chains, and myriad intersections of humans and technologies.  

Experts currently build and test cybersecurity approaches for components and systems at small scale and then attempt to upscale these to the infrastructures deployed to deliver services to society. The SCULI programme aims to transform this approach to securing such infrastructures, by instead understanding what the problems are at scale and designing solutions to work at that scale. The complexity and uncertainty cannot be removed. Instead, the programme embraces these issues as part of the problem and delivers solutions by both defining ideas and concepts, and designing and testing technical advances.  

Key elements of the programme include:  

• A model that provides on-the-fly representation of cybersecurity goodness and new metrics to support cyber risk decision-making.  
• New ways to compose and orchestrate security provision across variety of infrastructures with legacy and non-legacy elements. 
• Detection capabilities to assess with high accuracy, and at appropriate pace, the security state of such infrastructures throughout their operation to provide continuity of oversight and trust.
• Incident response playbooks for such ultra-large-scale infrastructures and optimal ways to balance human-machine decision-making when infrastructures of such scale are under attack.