Keeping water safe: Trine team helps treatment plants beef up security

Without water, there is no life.

“It's such a fundamental resource that we really don't even think about,” said Frank Baumgartner, a Trine University computer science and information technology major from Fort Wayne, Indiana.

“You can drive past a water treatment plant every day and, you don't really think about it, but it provides all the water for the city. If that's not filtered or cleaned or the wastewater isn’t managed, there are so many ways it could affect the community.”

Yet that fundamental resource and others are increasingly threatened. According to data cited by Reuters, public utilities in the United States faced almost 70% more cyberattacks in 2024 than in 2023.

A Trine University senior design team worked this year to help lessen that threat.

Northeast Indiana water treatment

For their senior design project, the team visited four northeast Indiana water treatment plants — those serving Angola, Waterloo, Ashley and Hamilton — to evaluate their infrastructure and provide recommendations on how to make them more secure.

Though the plants serve smaller areas than larger municipal facilities that have been targeted, the students realized they are no less vital to the communities they serve.

“Smaller communities like the ones we're working with don't really have any specific guidelines to go off of, like larger ones do,” said Baumgartner, “so we're trying to work with these smaller communities who might not have the technical know-how to implement some of these systems.”

In addition to Baumgartner, the team included computer science and information technology majors Jackson Wilhite from Brownsburg, Indiana, Nicholas Lauro from Columbus, Ohio, and Trennan Lilly from Garrett, Indiana.

Lilly said he chose the project for the real-world experience it provided.

“I thought it just sounded really cool to help water treatment plants because it's so important to keep them secure,” he said.

Meetings, visits and research

The students began by meeting sponsors, visiting plants and taking notes.

“The process started by first meeting each other and sort of getting a feel for what they were attempting to come up with, then evolved into a tour and they came in,” said Tom Selman, Angola Water Department superintendent. “We went through the facilities and showed them all the systems that we have in the way of our wells, our treatment and our distribution system, so they could get an overall feel of where we might be vulnerable.”

“I was able to explain to them how we operate and what we do, and they took it in their hands to see how we could be more secure about how we do it,” he said. “It was a fun process for me to learn what their job was and how it would help me do my job better.”

“I'd never been in a water treatment plant before this,” Baumgartner said. “It was fascinating to see all the ways that the water was collected, taken, filtered and tested. It gave me a new respect for how important that this resource is. It's not just you pick up water from a lake and you just dump it in the system.”

Even during the initial tours, the students were on the alert for any potential security concerns.

“I went in with a mindset of, okay, if I'm just a random person walking in here, what could I do?” Baumgartner said.

Systems in the real world

Lilly said examining the plants’ network documentation gave him an up-close look at real-world implementation.

“That taught me a lot about how networks are actually laid out in a real-life business and where vulnerabilities can stem from in those,” he said.

“We're dealing with real systems in the real world,” agreed Baumgartner, “and these types of issues aren't going to go away anytime soon.”

After compiling their notes, the group researched water plant security as well as grants that could help pay for improved safety measures.

“Implementing these cybersecurity systems can be expensive,” said Baumgartner, “but there are grants out there that the government or whomever might give to make it easy for them to implement these recommendations.”

Meeting multiple times a week, they then compiled a list of recommendations for each plant.

“We used techniques that we've learned in our education here at Trine to evaluate, and we conferred with our professors as well as to maybe the next steps that we might take,” Baumgartner said.

“They came up with a lot of really good ideas,” said Selman. “Some of it was complicated for my staff who are not computer people. They did a nice job of setting it up to where it was a little more user-friendly, but still secure.”

“It's baby steps right now, but we're getting better.”