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MIT professor develops method to verify compliance with Outer Space Treaty
Danagoulian
Areg Danagoulian of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is proposing a mechanism for verifying that Earth-orbiting satellites are in compliance with the Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits the placement of nuclear weapons in space. Danagoulian’s “concept and feasibility study,” titled “Verification of the Outer Space Treaty with cosmic protons,” was published recently in the journal Nature.
Stephen Yoo, Greg Mohler, Fan Zhang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 1 | January 2025 | Pages 162-175
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2372520
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The transition from analog to digital instrumentation and control (I&C) systems introduces new threats caused by cyberattacks in the nuclear industry. This paper proposes a self-healing strategy to respond to a false data injection attack that targets digital I&C systems, which is a type of cyberattack commonly targeting nuclear power plants with the potential to cause serious physical impacts. This resilience strategy for self-healing control contains three components: (1) an anomaly detection model that can detect false data injection attacks, (2) a device-level control that utilizes inferred values to perform control under a detected false data injection, and (3) a system-level control that leverages another controller that is not under attack to lead the system back to a safe operation state when the device-level control is unavailable. Anomaly detection and device-level control use an autoencoder while system-level control utilizes reinforcement learning. The proposed self-healing resilience strategy is demonstrated with a generic pressurized water reactor (GPWR) simulator under false data injections, targeting the steam generator water level. The results show that the proposed strategy effectively leads the system back to a normal operation state under various false data injection cases.