Over the past year, Tandon faculty have taken major roles in a number of significant collaborative efforts with U.S. government agencies. One particularly important initiative, funded by the Department of Energy, is the Digital Twin for Security and Code Verification, or DISCOVER project, which seeks to protect critical infrastructure from cyber attacks. Led by Principal Investigator Farshad Khorrami, a professor in NYU Tandon’s Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department, DISCOVER is charged with creating “a virtual simulation of real-world operational technology systems used within the energy industry, such as industrial control systems and programmable logic controllers.” 

In a news story released by NYU in March 2024, Khorrami explains that “current cyber defenses can’t necessarily catch stealthy malware in critical systems before deployment, potentially leaving a window open for bad actors to access our energy infrastructure. Our digital twin approach aims to shut that window. Because DISCOVER tests code virtually first, we can know about advanced threats, like ransomware, before they do damage.”

Other NYU-affiliated team members on the DISCOVER research team include Dr. Ramesh Karri,  Chair of Tandon’s ECE Department and co-founder of the NYU Center for Cybersecurity, and Prashanth Krishnamurthy, an NYU Tandon ECE research scientist. Rounding out the team are Dinghao Wu, Dewey Walker Professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University, and Jian Huang, assistant professor and Y.T. Lo Faculty Fellow in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. 

DISCOVER will also benefit from its industry partners, including a team of researchers from Con Edison led by Chief Information Security Officer Mikhail Falkovich, and from Narf Industries, a self-described, “small group of reverse engineers, vulnerability researchers, tool developers and overall good human beings that specialize in tailored solutions for government and large enterprises.” These companies will also play an integral part by “defining a market transition path” for DISCOVER. Michael Locasto, Narf’s Chief Technology Officer, will focus on refining the DISCOVER technology and “delivering it as part of Narf’s CySER suite of OT Security services, and making it available to a broad set of utilities and asset owners with a wide variety of constraints and use cases.”

The DISCOVER grant, which comes with $4.8 million in total funding—$3.34 million in federal funds, with the rest provided by participating institutions—was one of 16 grants awarded by DOE’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER), in support of President Biden’s Investing in America initiative.