RINA CONSULTING DEFENCE LTD

Their core work

RINA Consulting Defence is the UK defence and security arm of the RINA engineering group, providing specialist advisory work on risk assessment, cyber-physical security, and critical-infrastructure resilience. Their contribution in H2020 centred on three domains: airport passenger screening, transport infrastructure protection against extreme events, and cybersecurity for hospitals. They act as a technical expert brought in to model threats, design risk-based decision systems, and advise on security architecture rather than build hardware or run core research. In practice, they are the consultancy that consortia call when a project needs defence-grade thinking on who or what could go wrong, and how to detect it.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Their earliest H2020 work (TRESSPASS, 2018) focused on physical-world risk-based screening at airports — a classic border and aviation security topic. By 2018-2019 their scope broadened sharply into cyber-physical resilience: protecting transport networks from extreme events in FORESEE, and defending hospital IT environments from cyber threats in PANACEA. The shift is from "screen the passenger" towards "protect the system" — a clear move up the stack, from checkpoint security into infrastructure-level cyber risk.

They are heading toward integrated cyber-physical risk management — a strong fit for consortia working on healthcare cybersecurity, smart transport resilience, or defence-grade risk modelling for civilian infrastructure.

How they like to work

They join projects as a third-party specialist rather than leading or taking main-partner slots — all three H2020 engagements were third-party contributions. Across those three projects they touched 63 distinct consortium partners in 13 countries, so each engagement drops them into a large multi-country consortium where they play a focused expert role. Expect them to deliver a specific work package rather than manage the project or host core research.

Connected to 63 partners across 13 European countries through just three H2020 projects, indicating broad one-off exposure rather than a tight repeat network. Their anchoring is UK-based but consortium reach is pan-European.

What sets them apart

Unlike pure cybersecurity vendors or academic risk labs, RINA Consulting Defence brings a defence-and-engineering consulting mindset to civilian infrastructure — airports, hospitals, road networks. They sit inside the larger RINA engineering group, so partners get a small specialist team backed by a major industrial consultancy. Choose them when a consortium needs a credible defence-flavoured voice on risk assessment, screening logic, or cyber-physical security, without wanting a full industrial prime.

Highlights from their portfolio

• PANACEA
  Most strategically relevant project: cybersecurity for hospitals and IoMT, combining dynamic cyber risk assessment, identity management and blockchain — a dense cross-disciplinary brief.
• FORESEE
  Stretched them beyond pure security into transport engineering, using satellite data and structural health monitoring for landslide and pavement resilience.
• TRESSPASS
  Their clearest defence-heritage project: risk-based screening of passengers and luggage at borders and airports.