~IIT Gandhinagar students Miloni Thakkar and Mitwa Goswami win second prize at Intel Cup 2026 for TrustGate, an AI-based system to detect cyberattacks on water treatment plants.
Gandhinagar, Gujarat, Sep 23 (VNI): Two undergraduate students of the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN) have developed an artificial intelligence-based cybersecurity system designed to detect cyberattacks on industrial control systems used in critical infrastructure such as water treatment plants.
Third-year students Miloni Thakkar of Computer Science and Engineering and Mitwa Goswami of Electrical Engineering won the Second Prize at the Intel Cup, the International Undergraduate Electronic Design Contest 2026, held at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, China, for their project ‘TrustGate’.
The project was inspired by the 2021 cyberattack on a water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Florida, where an unidentified attacker remotely accessed the plant’s control system and attempted to increase the level of sodium hydroxide to nearly 100 times its safe concentration. The incident was detected only after a plant operator noticed the computer cursor moving and reversed the command. TrustGate aims to address this gap by analysing both network traffic and physical sensor data to determine whether an apparently legitimate command could have dangerous physical consequences. The students were mentored by Dr Sameer Kulkarni, Assistant Professor at IITGN.
At the core of TrustGate is a dual-stream Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) model with a cross-modal attention mechanism. The system separately analyses network traffic and physical sensor readings while allowing the two data streams to inform each other. The students tested their approach using the SWaT (Secure Water Treatment) dataset, a widely used benchmark based on a scaled-down six-stage water treatment testbed. TrustGate is designed to identify the likely nature of an attack and the specific physical component affected, displaying the information on a live map of the plant. The system can also operate on embedded hardware without relying on cloud connectivity.
For the international contest, participating teams were required to build a working system on Intel’s DK-2500 hardware platform, submit a technical report and defend their work before an expert judging panel. TrustGate incorporates TPM 2.0 technology to verify system integrity at boot and a self-healing watchdog that automatically restarts core processes in case of a failure. Mitwa led hardware integration, TPM attestation and embedded Linux deployment, while Miloni led the AI model architecture, training, ablation studies and OpenVINO deployment. Prof Sameer Kulkarni said his mentoring focused on encouraging the students to question their assumptions and take ownership of the project’s development.
The students said TrustGate remains a research prototype validated on a laboratory testbed and is not yet deployed in a live industrial facility. Further work is required to test the system with live plant data, support additional industrial protocols and obtain formal security certifications before any real-world pilot. They said the underlying approach of combining cyber and physical data could potentially be adapted for other critical infrastructure sectors, including power grids and oil and gas facilities. The recognition at the international competition has encouraged the students to continue developing TrustGate as a longer-term research project. VNI NEWS, IIT Gandhinagar, IITGN, TrustGate, AI cybersecurity, cyberattacks, water treatment plants, industrial control systems, Intel Cup 2026, Miloni Thakkar, Mitwa Goswami, Shanghai Jiao TonShanghai Jiao Tong University,
IIT Gandhinagar AI cybersecurity, TrustGate AI system, cyberattack detection water plants, Intel Cup 2026, industrial control system cybersecurity, VNINews, VNINews.com