Countries are increasingly committed to boosting a sustainable, resource-efficient, low-carbon economy. To reduce carbon emissions, Governments have realized that they need to increase public transport usage by making railways more productive and attractive to passengers. One way that railways and metros are achieving this is through the digitalization process.

However, all the efficiency gains resulting from increased network interconnectivity provides cyber-criminals with a bigger, more complex, and more vulnerable attack surface. Recognizing this increased threat landscape and complexity, the EU commission mandated CENELEC to integrate the essential requirements of EU Directives into a Technical Specification. Railway and cyber experts came up with the recently published TS 50701, which shows how to implement a state-of-the-art cybersecurity protection in a railway environment.

This talk discusses the new TS-50701 cybersecurity standard, the most important takeaways for both wayside and onboard systems, and important network segmentation considerations. The presentation will explore reference architectures and concrete examples based on rail cybersecurity projects.