- Describe your company in one paragraph.
Cyentific AS is a cybersecurity innovation centre headquartered in Oslo, Norway. Founded in 2022, we specialise in AI-driven security operations, cyber intelligence, automation, and the protection of critical infrastructure across Cloud–Edge–IoT environments. We contribute actively to international cybersecurity standardisation, having co-developed open standards including CACAO security playbooks, STIX/TAXII, and OpenC2, several of which have been adopted by EU-funded cybersecurity programmes and national authorities. The company also participates in European innovation projects focused on building AI-driven cybersecurity capacity with current work spanning edge-native security architectures, symbolic threat detection, and ontology-driven threat modelling for operational technology environments.
- What challenge are you addressing under the O-CEI Horizon’s first Open Call, and how is your proposal relevant to the challenge?
HYPEREDGE-SG addresses Challenge P1C8 (Cybersecurity) under O-CEI Horizon’s first Open Call, which called for cybersecurity solutions applicable to Cloud–Edge–IoT energy community infrastructures.
We are currently working with Pilot 1.3 on Krk Island, Croatia, where EKOKvarner operates a Renewable Energy Community integrating solar inverters, battery storage, heat pumps, EV chargers, and IoT sensors across up to 300 households. These assets communicate through a diversified set of protocols and are managed through a centralised server. Currently, the cybersecurity posture is described as “critical”. As the community scales, this absence of security may grow into a systemic risk to both the energy infrastructure and the households that depend on it.
HYPEREDGE-SG addresses this gap directly. We are developing an edge-deployable cybersecurity stack that integrates intrusion detection, semantic reasoning about device behaviour, identity-aware access control, and command-level governance into a single coordinated system. Rather than relying on opaque statistical models, the system uses deterministic, explainable detection, which makes it auditable and appropriate for safety-critical energy infrastructure. It is designed to operate on constrained hardware at the network edge, filling a gap that existing industrial security platforms, architected for centralised environments, cannot address.
- What is the expected impact of your proposal?
HYPEREDGE-SG demonstrates that meaningful cybersecurity can be delivered at the energy edge, where centralised platforms too often have direct, ungoverned reach to field devices, and where no intermediary layer validates what passes between them. The project aims to deliver a TRL-6 validated prototype operating on a representative testbed that replicates the topology, protocols, and device behaviours of a real renewable energy community.
At the pilot level, the project moves Pilot 1.3’s security posture from the critical baseline toward a state where telemetry is monitored, device behaviour is validated against domain-specific semantic models, and control commands pass through a governed enforcement point. This gives the pilot operator (and the broader O-CEI ecosystem) a reference architecture for what edge cybersecurity in a renewable energy community could look like in practice.
Beyond the immediate pilot, the approach addresses a structural gap in the emerging European landscape of energy communities under the Clean Energy Package. As these communities scale from tens to thousands of connected households, the attack surface grows proportionally. HYPEREDGE-SG’s standards-aligned/inspired design (SAREF4ENER, IEC 61850) and containerised deployment model provide a transferable cybersecurity blueprint applicable to other O-CEI pilots and similar CEI architectures across Europe.
For Cyentific AS, the project validates our semantic reasoning approach against real-world energy infrastructure, advancing our applied R&D capability in operational technology cybersecurity and strengthening the company’s positioning as a contributor to European critical infrastructure protection.
