Overview
SwiftAutomate rethinks Industrial Control System (ICS) architecture for critical infrastructure. It collapses the traditionally air-gapped, sprawling HMI/SCADA stack into a single authenticated, horizontally scalable service, validated against a simulated nuclear power plant environment.
🥇 1st Prize — HackTheBox Hackathon.
The Problem
Classic ICS deployments bolt authentication on as an afterthought and run HMI and SCADA as separate, hard-to-scale silos. That creates a wide attack surface and brittle operations for exactly the systems that can least afford downtime.
Architecture
- Unified control plane — HMI and SCADA responsibilities merged behind one authenticated API, eliminating duplicated trust boundaries.
- Secure-by-design — every command is authenticated and authorised; no implicit trust between components.
- Horizontal scalability — the control service scales out under load instead of relying on a single vertical HMI box.
- Simulated plant — a digital twin of a nuclear plant drives realistic sensor/actuator telemetry for testing.
Tech Stack
- Containerised microservices
- Cloud-native, horizontally scalable deployment
- Strong service-to-service authentication
Highlights
- Demonstrated safe operation and attack resistance on a simulated reactor.
- Single pane of glass for operators, without sacrificing isolation guarantees.