Conrad Ekisa

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-3821-7964

Research Project Title: Cybersecurity vulnerabilities in Industrial Control Systems

Supervisors/s: Dr Diarmuid O’Briain, Dr Yvonne Kavanagh

Project Funding: SERD 2022, GOI-IES 2021, IT Carlow President’s Fellowship 2020

 

 

  • Biography
  • Research Project Description
  • Publications and Outputs

Biography

Conrad comes from a Telecommunications Engineering background with interest in wireless communication technologies and IP Networks. Since then, I have taken interest in Linux System Administration, and Python programming. My current research interest is cybersecurity in the Operational Technology space for which I am currently pursing my PhD.

I am a technology enthusiast and I take great pride in creating engineering solutions to societal and personal challenges of various nature. I am Ugandan and passionate about leveraging technology to contribute to the education, agriculture and health space in my country. I am also passionate about solutions backed by green energy and currently have interest in e-mobility in rural communities and secondary cities.

Research Project Description

Industrial Control Systems are behind a great deal of the critial infrastracture in our country. For long, cybersecurity hasn’t quite been a concern in ICS implementations leaving these systems insecure by design. There are several cases today of cyber attacks specifically targeted towards ICS.

My research attempts to explore cybersecurity vulnerabilities in ICS and make cybersecurity framework recommendations to this effect. Specifically, I am investigating inherit vulnerbilities in the Modbus/TCP protocol and exploring Man-in-the-middle attacks leveragint the Modbus/TCP protocol. The goal of this research is to lower the barrier of entry into cybersecurity, shine a light on possible vulnerabilities in the commonly used Modbus/TCP protocol and make recommendations as to how these vulneabilties could be mitigated.

Publications and Outputs

Ekisa, C., O’Briain, D., & Kavanagh, Y. (2021). An Open-Source Testbed to Visualise ICS
Cybersecurity Weaknesses and Remediation Strategies – A Research Agenda Proposal, ISSC
2021, Athlone, Ireland. IEEE ISBN: 978-1-6654-3429-4 DOI: 10.1109/ISSC52156.2021.9467852

– Documents my project research agenda

C. Ekisa, D. Ó. Briain and Y. Kavanagh, “VICSORT – A Virtualised ICS Open-source Research Testbed,” 2022 Cyber Research Conference – Ireland (Cyber-RCI), Galway, Ireland, 2022, pp. 1-8, doi: 10.1109/Cyber-RCI55324.2022.10032670.

– Documents VISCORT – an ICS testbed I built to lower the barrier of entry into ICS Cybersecurity.