Railways and Metros are safe, efficient, reliable and environmentally friendly mass carriers, and they are becoming even more important means of transportation given the need to address climate change. However, being such critical infrastructures turns metro and railway operators as well as related intermodal transport operators into attractive targets for cyber and/or physical attacks. The Safety4Rails project delivers methods and systems to increase the safety and recovery of track-based inter-city railway and intra-city metro transportation.

It addresses both cyber-only attacks (such as impact from WannaCry infections), physical-only attacks (such as the Madrid commuter trains bombing in 2014) and combined cyber-physical attacks, which an important emerging scenarios are given increasing IoT infrastructure integration. SAFETY4RAILS concentrates on rush hour rail transport scenarios where many passengers are using metros and railways to commute to work or attend mass events (e.g. large multi-venue sporting events such as the Olympics).

When an incident occurs during heavy usage, metro and railway operators have to consider many aspects to ensure passenger safety and security, e.g. carry out a threat analysis, maintain situation awareness, establish crisis communication and response, and they have to ensure that mitigation steps are taken and communicated to travellers and other users. SAFETY4RAILS will improve the handling of such events through a holistic approach.

It analysed the cyber-physical resilience of metro and railway systems and delivers mitigation strategies for an efficient response, and, in order to remain secure given ever-changing novel emerging risks, it facilitates continuous adaptation of the SAFETY4RAILS solution; this has been validated by two rail transport operators and the results supporting the re-design of the final prototype.