Title:

From Chip to Chain Reaction: Understanding Supply Chain Risk across System Scales

Keynote speaker:

Chris Spirito, Nuclear Cyber Security Consultant, Idaho National Laboratory; Hacker, Sanctum Security, USA

Chris Spirito believes technology should empower people, not control them. As founder of Sanctum Security, he crafts Liberation Patterns – workflow optimizations designed with uncompromising precision, elegant simplicity, and intentional design – making sophisticated security accessible without deep expertise. Currently a Nuclear Cyber Security Consultant at Idaho National Laboratory, Chris supports US partner programs and serves as PI for research on FPGAs and autonomous operations in advanced reactors. Previously he was the International Cyber Lead for The MITRE Corporation, leading global cybersecurity initiatives and has served on the board of WiRED International for 15 years, delivering medical education to underserved communities worldwide, embodying his conviction that whether through security or health, technology must empower human dignity and potential.

Abstract:

From Chip to Chain Reaction: Understanding Supply Chain Risk Across System Scales traces a microchip’s journey from fabrication in Taiwan through the global supply chain to its final destination in a nuclear reactor safety system, revealing how AI-augmented pattern-enabled analysis bridges the “perception-comprehension gap” in critical infrastructure security. The 30-minute presentation demonstrates how security patterns achieve unprecedented analytical depth across five system scales—from nanometer-level hardware verification detecting fabrication anomalies in billions of transistors, through cryptographic supply chain provenance tracking, real-time behavioral monitoring of millions of events, comprehensive attack surface enumeration revealing 47 vectors (versus 12 from manual testing), to facility-wide cross-system correlation—delivering measurable improvements including Test & Evaluation coverage increasing from 40% to 85% while reducing execution time from 2 weeks to 3 hours. By demonstrating how comprehensive visibility across all layers addresses the cascade problem where attacks propagate through blind spots in traditional manual analysis, the presentation establishes that pattern-enabled security analysis provides a practical, operationally proven path forward for securing critical infrastructure at the scale and complexity that modern threats demand.