CyberUnite: Adaptive Resilient Security for Cross-Border Critical Infrastructure
Jan 2026 - Present
All-island cybersecurity research programme funded with up to €4 million over four years through the North South Research Programme (Shared Island Fund), bringing together University of Limerick, Queen's University Belfast, MTU, UCC, and Gas Networks Ireland to develop adaptive, resilient security for critical infrastructure and converged IT/OT environments.
Problem Statement
- Cross-border critical infrastructure and converged IT/OT environments need a unified security posture despite heterogeneous CPS and IIoT systems.
- Multi-stage Advanced Persistent Threats are difficult to detect, investigate, and reconstruct across the IT/OT boundary with existing tooling.
- Data sharing between partner institutions and industry requires policy-aware controls and compliance guarantees.
What I Led
- Leading Work Package 2 (Data-Centric-Enforcement with PDP-ZT for CPS), enforcing Zero Trust policies on cyber-physical system architectures.
- Contributed to architecture and implementation of data-centric zero-trust controls for CPS and IIoT environments.
- Designed secure telemetry and policy enforcement prototypes for compliance-aware data sharing.
- Supported AI-driven detection and autonomous response integration into a cyber-digital twin testbed.
Deliverables
- CPS telemetry and policy prototype components
- Cyber-digital twin threat simulation workflows
- Cross-institutional architecture and validation outputs
Tech Stack
Industry Relevance
Provides operators and vendors with a repeatable blueprint - validated through realistic critical-infrastructure scenarios with Gas Networks Ireland - for evaluating adaptive cyber-resilience controls, from AI-driven detection to quantum-safe cryptography, before deployment in live operations.
Funding
- Programme
- North South Research Programme (NSRP), Call 2
- Funder
- Government of Ireland, through the Shared Island Fund
- Administered by
- Higher Education Authority (HEA)
- Recipient
- Nimbus Research Centre, Munster Technological University (consortium partner)
- Amount
- Up to €4 million
- Duration
- 4 years
Links
Consortium
CyberUnite is co-led by Professor Donna O'Shea of the University of Limerick's School of Engineering and Dr Kieran McLaughlin of Queen's University Belfast's Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT), with Munster Technological University, University College Cork, and industry partner Gas Networks Ireland. It is the first dedicated funding awarded by an Irish government agency to support cross-border collaborative research in cybersecurity.
Work packages
- WP1: Explainable Trustworthy Decision Making for CPS
- WP2: Data-Centric-Enforcement with PDP-ZT for CPS
- WP3: Secure Bedrock for CPS Operational Resilience
- WP4: Cyber-Digital-Twin (CDT) for CPS Critical-Infrastructure