Security-integrated nuclear process access control

The intent of this thesis research is to develop a concept/methodology to advance technologies for controls of network accesses to the industrial processes of safety/operation-critical and to contribute to the nuclear process control modernization with improved nuclear operation security and consequently increased nuclear safety and cost savings. This thesis is focused on the security-integrated nuclear process network-access controls for modernizing nuclear operations. This thesis research commenced with assessments of the current states of nuclear processes in the live nuclear generating stations and identified improvements on the current nuclear practices and security concerns of using the network-based intelligent features of modern process controls for nuclear operations. This thesis has created SNP - Security-integrated Nuclear Process, OBAC - Operation Based Access Control, NOAA - Nuclear Operation Access Authentication, CSM - Cost Savings Model, etc. as the fundamental developments for contributions to the nuclear operations modernization with improved operation security and subsequently increased nuclear safety and cost savings in daily nuclear operations. The SNP is to transform the current nuclear practices into network-based nuclear operations that include equipment performance monitoring, nuclear data processing, nuclear equipment control and maintenance. The OBAC is an operation-based access control built upon the core nuclear operations and facilitates the security and quality controls of network accesses to nuclear operations. The NOAA is to provide user security authentication for access to nuclear operation network, which is composed of APP for access pre-access authentication and AQP for access qualification authentication. The CSM is designed for evaluations of the SNP and associated designs in terms of cost savings opportunity. The feasibility and practicality of these new designs are illustrated in the thesis, by analytical and numerical methods. The significance of these new designs is tremendous, resulting in potentially significant cost savings in daily nuclear generation, in addition with increased nuclear operation network security and subsequently the nuclear safety that is priceless.