BY Use case

Building an Asset Inventory for Rail OT

Rail organizations often operate complex OT environments that have grown over decades, spanning signaling, rolling stock, stations, depots, and field infrastructure. Building and maintaining an accurate asset inventory is foundational to cybersecurity, but traditional IT discovery methods fall short in rail environments where safety, legacy systems, and operational constraints dominate.

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Challenges

The Main Challenges in Building an Asset Inventory

Rail OT assets are distributed, long-lived, and inconsistently documented

Equipment is deployed across wide geographies and upgraded incrementally, often without centralized records. As a result, teams lack confidence in what is connected, where it resides, and how it interacts with other systems.

Active discovery techniques are often unsafe or impractical

Many rail systems cannot tolerate scanning or probing without risk to operations or certification. This limits the ability to discover assets using conventional security tools.

Asset context matters as much as asset count

Knowing that a device exists is not enough, teams need to understand its role, communication patterns, and operational dependencies to assess risk meaningfully.

OUR Solutions

How CylusOne Supports Asset Inventory for Rail OT

Identification of Rail OT Assets

CylusOne builds asset inventories through passive observation of OT communications across rail environments. Using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and without scanning or interacting with systems, it identifies assets using passive OT fingerprinting based on protocol behavior, communication roles, and observed interactions.

Contextual Mapping of Asset Relationships

CylusOne enriches asset data with operational context, mapping relationships between systems and showing how assets interact across signaling, rolling stock, stations, and control centers. This transforms static lists into a living representation of the rail network and provides a dynamic view of the network topology and zone/conduit relationships.

Continuous Maintenance of Asset Accuracy

CylusOne keeps inventories current as environments evolve. Continuous monitoring of operational traffic highlights new, changed, or inactive assets, helping teams maintain accuracy over time without relying on manual updates or disruptive discovery methods.

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