In a world where cyberattacks can shut down pipelines, cripple electric grids, and threaten national security — a 26-year-old Filipino-American computer scientist may have just taken a major step toward solving one of the most dangerous problems facing critical infrastructure today.
Francis Mendoza, a cybersecurity researcher from Arizona State University, has developed a radical new defensive architecture that could change how governments and private companies protect power grids, gas pipelines, and water systems from foreign adversaries.
His invention, dubbed Garrison, was recently presented at the prestigious IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC 2025) — placing Mendoza alongside world-leading researchers in distributed systems, blockchain, and advanced cryptography.
But unlike most blockchain presentations — which focus on financial technologies, tokens, and speculative crypto assets — Mendoza’s work applies the technology to the far more urgent problem of defending physical infrastructure under active threat from nation-state cyberwarfare.
For years, defense experts have warned that America’s aging industrial control systems (known as SCADA) remain one of the most vulnerable attack surfaces in modern cyber conflict. These legacy systems — responsible for controlling power stations, pipelines, and grids — often run on decades-old hardware not built for the modern threat environment.
“Most of these systems were never designed for adversaries like we see today: advanced persistent threats backed by nation-states,” Mendoza explains. “You can’t just patch or replace them easily. You have to find ways to defend what’s already running — while attackers are actively watching.”
That’s where Garrison comes in.
Instead of requiring expensive overhauls or hardware replacements, Mendoza’s system wraps existing SCADA equipment inside a blockchain-driven overlay network that operates as a kind of self-healing, tamper-proof “digital shield” around vulnerable infrastructure.
Garrison combines Byzantine Fault-Tolerant consensus algorithms, formal mathematical verification of physical states, and ephemeral network address obfuscation — making it vastly harder for attackers to map the system, penetrate defenses, or inject malicious control commands.
“It doesn’t just monitor traffic — it mathematically proves whether a proposed physical state is actually valid,” Mendoza says. “If an attacker tries to siphon gas, destabilize a power grid, or spoof control commands, the system detects and rejects the attack in real-time.”
While much of the blockchain world focuses on financial services and cryptocurrencies, Mendoza has applied distributed ledger technology to industrial defense — one of the hardest and most neglected frontiers in cybersecurity.
The Garrison system’s permissioned blockchain is not about money — it’s about security. Only hardened gateway nodes can publish operational states, rotate addresses, and participate in consensus, while every update leaves a tamper-evident cryptographic audit trail.
This enables secure coordination across highly sensitive systems — from pipelines to power substations — even in contested or degraded environments where cyberattacks might normally paralyze operations.
Mendoza’s work was one of only a select group of papers accepted to IEEE ICBC 2025, one of the world’s premier research venues in blockchain, distributed consensus, and secure computation. There, he presented Garrison to an international audience of researchers, engineers, and policy experts — marking a major academic milestone for Mendoza.
“Francis’s work is a rare example of truly applied blockchain research with enormous real-world impact potential,” said one colleague familiar with the rigors of the IEEE selection process. “He’s not solving a theoretical problem — he’s tackling one of the hardest cybersecurity challenges facing critical infrastructure operators right now.”
Mendoza’s breakthrough comes at a time of growing urgency. From the Colonial Pipeline ransomware incident to ongoing probes by foreign intelligence services targeting US grid operators, critical infrastructure is increasingly becoming a front line in modern hybrid warfare.
“The battlefield is shifting from cyberspace to cyber-physical,” Mendoza says. “If we can’t defend our energy, industrial, and water systems, we’re completely defenseless against a cyber 9/11 that would cripple our entire society.”
