Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Gedare Bloom <[email protected]> · Sat, 21 Apr 2018 10:53:24 -0400

Hello EPICS Community,

tl;dr: I'm looking for a partner willing to work with me on security
hardening their EPICS deployment over the next 3 years if we
successfully obtain NSF funding. I'm also looking for statements of
general interest/enthusiasm about security hardening for EPICS.

I'm one of the RTEMS maintainers and also an assistant professor of
computer science at Howard University. I'm planning an NSF CICI grant
proposal submission before June 4 [1] that would intend to improve the
cyber security of the EPICS hardware/software infrastructure for
scientific research with an emphasis on RTOS security hardening, EPICS
security hardening, and evaluation/enhancement of the EPICS network
protocols for secure access.

If you're generally interested in this project, or you think it is a
total waste of time, I'd be glad to hear about it here and discuss
some more of the overall ideas. If you and your institution might be
able to partner on this, please keep reading and contact me privately
so we can arrange to discuss details offline.

I'm looking for a partner in the EPICS community able and willing to
commit to work with me on integration of security improvements with a
plan to install/upgrade EPICS (using RTEMS on the IOCs) in their
deployment in the next 3 years.

I have reached out to the EPICS Council to gauge a general interest in
this direction of development and received an initially positive
response. Now, I would like to find a partner so that I can put
together a proposal with firm commitments in place before the proposal
submission deadline. I can carve out some funding for a partner
willing to work directly with me to integrate and deploy the
prototypes developed through the project.

[1] https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2018/nsf18547/nsf18547.htm

Sincerely,
Gedare Bloom
RTEMS Project Maintainer
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Howard University

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System