Critical Infrastructure Operations
Quantum-Ready Critical Infrastructure AI Command Center
A defense platform for critical infrastructure that tells a cyberattack apart from an equipment failure, predicts the risk forming behind it, and recommends the action for an operator to approve.
The challenge
A control room sees an alarm and cannot tell whether it is being attacked or whether a machine is failing. The two need opposite responses, and the wrong call costs time the operator does not have. Meanwhile the traffic carrying those signals is protected by cryptography that a quantum computer will eventually break, and an attacker recording it today does not need to break it today.
Who it is for
Operators of critical infrastructure and the executives accountable for it.
My role
I designed and built the platform end to end, from the detection models through the cryptography to the executive view.
How it works
- Operational-technology traffic and equipment telemetry are read in one place, so an attack and a fault are judged against the same evidence rather than by two teams looking at two screens.
- The platform states which of the two it believes it is seeing, and it shows what led it there.
- It reports the risk that is forming rather than only the event that already landed.
- It recommends the action to take, and a person approves it before anything moves.
- Executives read the state of the system from anywhere, over a secured channel.
Security and compliance
- Hybrid post-quantum cryptography protects the traffic, so what an attacker records today stays unreadable when quantum computers arrive.
- It uses the federal post-quantum standards and keeps a classical layer beside them, so a weakness found in either one is not a single point of failure.
- The platform carries a quantum-readiness assessment and a migration path for the equipment it protects.
- The language models in the platform are tested against prompt injection before release, because a model that can recommend an action on live infrastructure is a target.
The decisions that mattered
- I put attack detection and fault detection in one system, because telling them apart is the judgment the operator actually needs and two separate tools cannot make it.
- I chose hybrid cryptography over a straight replacement, so the migration does not rest on any single algorithm holding.
- I kept a person in the approval path. An automated action on live infrastructure is not reversible.
Outcomes
- The platform separates a cyberattack from an equipment failure and names which one it is reporting.
- It carries protection built to the federal post-quantum standards rather than a plan to adopt them later.