A t the peak of the morning rush hour, over half a million people use the London Underground. As the world’s first underground railway, it’s been in operation for over 150 years; constantly servicing the needs of the near nine million people who call the capital city home. “It’s incredible to be offered the opportunity to make it a better place for us to live and work,” says Alex.
London has been a major city for over two millennia and is the lifeline of the UK economy, with major political and financial industries all residing here. Disrupt the transport network and it could have a serious impact on the rest of the country. “Choke London, and you can cause serious damage,” says Alex. “Imagine disrupting two Monday mornings in a row. You could bring the UK economy to its knees.”
Bringing a feat of 19th-century engineering into the digital age
Cybersecurity is playing a pivotal role in protecting the residents of one of the world’s busiest cities. As a huge project is underway to deploy state-of-the-art digital technology to improve the transport network’s efficiency, a team of cybersecurity defenders have been assigned the task of keeping the capital safe from attacks, and Alex is one of them. “Cybersecurity for railways is such a new field,” he says. “So this was a great opportunity. I feel like I’m working in London’s latest pioneering role.”
The London Underground is in the middle of a huge modernization program to cope with the city’s ever-increasing population. “It can get very busy down there,” Alex explains. “So we need to figure out how to fit more people on the tube. We can’t make the trains wider, because then we’d have to bore bigger tunnels, and we are limited to how much longer we can make them due to the platform lengths — so our solution is to make them more frequent.”
The secret to making trains faster is getting them to communicate
Recently, Alex helped upgrade the Victoria Line — one of the most frequent metro lines in the world. “Just 100 seconds after a train has left the station, another one comes in,” he says. The added capacity not only means more people can travel, it also creates more jobs. But the increased traffic also means the trains have to be in constant communication. “When you have trains traveling much closer together, they need to be able to slow down or speed up safely, that much faster,” he says.
Replacing the Victorian system with a constant WiFi-based stream of digital information between the train and control center opens up a world of opportunities. “It means Transport for London (TfL) can adapt the train service based on factors like station crowding and weather conditions in order to maximize passenger flow,” he says.
On the metro of the future, every single form of communication between trains will have to be shielded by layer upon layer of security. “It’s a bit like an onion,” explains Alex. “When you build a system architecture, you lay out the secure boundary lines, keeping outside communications at the edge and the ones vital to passenger safety nestled in the middle.”
Wrapped up in meticulously configured firewalls, advanced cryptography, and other smart solutions, Alex has to be as innovative as possible, by designing systems that give the right people the necessary levels of access while keeping others at bay.
Uniting the fringes of technology
On the railway, you can see an amazing contract between 21st-century technology and 19th-century infrastructure.” Alex can’t rip out the entire underground system and start from scratch. Once installed, the new technology must be thoroughly tested. During engineering hours, at the flip of a switch, the new system must take control from existing technology that can date as far back as the 1930s. “It’s at this point we can call in ethical hackers to test if our solution is truly robust,” he says.
Starting as an engineer in the Siemens Graduate Program, he’s found his perfect place within the company. “The people who developed the London Underground were pioneers,” he says. “And now I’m carrying on their work.”
Alexander Patton is a Systems Engineer in mass transit cybersecurity for Siemens in the UK. He’s lived all over the world but now calls London home. In his spare time, Alex loves cooking and learning about Japan. Find out more about working at Siemens.
