For twenty years, OT security has mostly meant wrapping fragile control systems in layers of compensating controls: segmentation, firewalls, DMZs, hardening and monitoring. It was the right call. But those layers are now complex, expensive to maintain and a daily burden on operations, and the control system inside is as fragile as it ever was.

This session applies Nassim Nicholas Taleb's idea of antifragility to industrial control systems. A robust system withstands stress and stays the same. An antifragile system improves because of stress. Process control has been building systems that learn from their own operating data for decades, and ICS detection tools learn from plant traffic. The controller itself has never learned to defend itself.

The session covers a practical application, a self-preserving controller, where the system already has the data it needs to improve but doesn't use it.
The self-preserving controller reads signals that common PLC platforms already expose to their own logic: scan time, logic change detection, forced I/O status and communication load. When several of them shift together, it sheds non-essential functions to protect the control loop.