Water & wastewater | Modelled case study
Establish a cryptographic baseline for a water SCADA network
Where does cryptography protect control, telemetry, engineering, and business interfaces-and where is it absent?
The modelled organisation
A recognisable problem reaches the operating agenda
This composite scenario follows the Utility Manager · SCADA Engineering · Cybersecurity functions. It is grounded in the cited problem context but does not identify a real customer.
Operating environment
A water utility operates treatment plants, pumping stations, reservoirs, remote PLC gateways, engineering workstations, telemetry, and vendor maintenance links.
What is at stake
Control and recovery must remain available during facility loss, communications degradation, or supplier intervention without leaving permanent shared access behind.
Situation
Small teams inherit vendor appliances, radio links, remote sites, and unmanaged certificates without a consolidated technical baseline.
Event that forces action
EPA cybersecurity assessment, treatment-plant modernization, or insurer requirement.
Concrete system boundary
Systems this case study puts in scope
The model is specific about the operational surfaces that must be discovered, changed, or independently checked.
SCADA servers
engineering workstations
remote PLC gateways
telemetry and business network interfaces
Modelled case study walkthrough
How this organisation would use QNSI
The walkthrough connects the real-world problem to a bounded QNSI contribution and an independently reviewable result.
Recognise the operating condition
Small teams inherit vendor appliances, radio links, remote sites, and unmanaged certificates without a consolidated technical baseline.
Frame the decision the owners must make
Where does cryptography protect control, telemetry, engineering, and business interfaces-and where is it absent?
Apply QNSI to the controlled boundary
Capture protocols, certificates, keys, algorithms, locations, vendors, owners, and confidence levels in QNSI inventory.
Leave the team with a concrete result
A water-system crypto baseline showing protected paths, plaintext exposure, unsupported assets, and practical first actions.
Prove the result in the organisation's environment
The utility confirms field observations, process-safety effects, vendor support, budgets, and risk-treatment priorities.
What useful success looks like
A decision artifact plus proof from the real environment
The model stops at a target result. It becomes an actual case study only when a customer produces and independently validates this evidence in production.
Decision artifact
A water-system crypto baseline showing protected paths, plaintext exposure, unsupported assets, and practical first actions.
Independent validation boundary
The utility confirms field observations, process-safety effects, vendor support, budgets, and risk-treatment priorities.
Real-world problem grounding
Primary sources behind the model
These sources establish the external requirement, failure mode, or risk context used to model this case. They do not endorse HEOSSI or prove that QNSI completed the scenario.
Customer evidence status
This is modelled, not a customer claim
The organisation is a composite and the result is a target state. This page does not prove a deployment, customer outcome, certification, legal conclusion, regulator endorsement, or completed control.