18 hrs ago
IIT Gandhinagar Students Build AI System for Infrastructure Security
Two students at IIT Gandhinagar built a computer system called TrustGate.
It is designed to help protect places such as water plants, power grids, and factories.
TrustGate checks both computer-network activity and physical sensor readings.
This helps it notice when a computer command could cause dangerous changes in real equipment.
It can also show operators which part of a plant may be affected.
The system works on embedded hardware, so it does not need cloud internet access.
It was tested using data from a small water-treatment laboratory testbed.
The students won second prize in an international design contest.
TrustGate is still a research prototype and needs more testing before it can be used in real facilities.
IIT Gandhinagar students Miloni Thakkar and Mitwa Goswami developed TrustGate, an AI-based cybersecurity system for critical infrastructure.
The system combines network traffic with physical sensor data to detect sophisticated cyber attacks and identify affected equipment.
TrustGate provides plant operators with real-time information through a live map of the facility.
The prototype was inspired partly by the 2021 attack on a water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Florida.
The students won second prize at the 2026 Intel Cup international undergraduate electronic design contest in China.
- Who
- IIT Gandhinagar undergraduate students Miloni Thakkar and Mitwa Goswami, mentored by Dr Sameer Kulkarni.
- What
- They developed TrustGate, an AI-based system that combines network and physical sensor data to detect cyber attacks on critical infrastructure.
- Where
- The contest was held at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, while TrustGate was tested on laboratory water-treatment data.
- When
- The students received second prize at the 2026 Intel Cup; the project was partly inspired by a 2021 attack.
- Why
- The system was created to address gaps in conventional industrial security tools that may not identify the physical consequences of apparently legitimate commands.
Key facts
- System
- TrustGate
- Developers
- Miloni Thakkar and Mitwa Goswami
- Award
- Second prize at the 2026 Intel Cup international Undergraduate Electronic Design Contest
- Testing dataset
- SWaT, based on a six-stage water-treatment testbed
- Core technology
- Dual-stream BiLSTM model with cross-modal attention
- Offline operation
- Designed to run on embedded hardware without cloud connectivity
- Current status
- Research prototype validated on a laboratory testbed
Quotes
Miloni Thakkar
Third-year computer science and engineering student at IIT Gandhinagar and co-developer of TrustGate
“TrustGate closes that gap by understanding both the cyber and physical sides of an attack together.”
rediff.com
Sources
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