A year ago, shortly after presenting the Chernobyl research , I was kind of surprised to find out that a plethora of brand-new Teleperm XS (2nd generation) components were available on eBay. Framatome’s Teleperm XS (TXS) is a digital Instrumentation & Control platform designed specifically for use in safety systems in Nuclear power plants, as a replacement for, or upgrades to their analog counterparts. It is one of the most widely used digital safety I&C platforms, sustaining the main defense line (Reactor Protection System, Engineered Safety Features Actuation System) in dozens of nuclear reactors globally, including Europe, USA, Russia, and China. Obviously, that was a good opportunity to dig deeper into the, usually, closed world of nuclear digital safety I&C systems, so I bought some of the most important TXS modules. That was the starting point for the research I'm releasing today: " A Practical Analysis of Cyber-Physical Attacks Against Nuclear Reactors &
Ukraine's nuclear regulator confirms Chernobyl's post-invasion radiation spikes had an 'abnormal origin'.
First off I would like to provide some context for those readers who are not familiar with this topic. In 2023 I presented at BlackHat USA ' Seeing Through the Invisible: Radiation Spikes Detected in Chernobyl During the Russian Invasion Show Possible Evidence of Fabrication '. Kim Zetter also wrote an investigative piece . The research materials are publicly available. As I casually discovered a few days ago, around the date I received the acceptance notification from BlackHat, the paper ' Preliminary assessment of the radiological consequences of the hostile military occupation of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone ' was submitted to the 'Journal of Radiological Protection'. This paper would be eventually approved and then published in September. So it seems that both investigations were being performed in parallel, but unfortunately we never crossed our paths. There is also a significant detail: this investigation doesn't come from a random guy like me, but