Nation-State Resilience for Critical Infrastructure

Critical infrastructure faces a different class of adversary. Cyber-criminal and nation-state threats increasingly target infrastructure, devices, and supply chains — not only users and applications. For operators of essential systems, resilience against patient, well-resourced attackers is no longer optional.

National cyber leaders have repeatedly warned that state-sponsored actors have pre-positioned widely inside compromised routers, smart hardware, and infrastructure — waiting, not just probing. The FCC has determined that foreign-made routers common in homes and businesses pose an unacceptable national-security risk and placed them on its Covered List. For critical infrastructure, the implication is stark: the hardware already inside your network may be the threat, and the OT that runs your operations often cannot run an agent to defend itself.

Owner-controlled trust denies an advanced adversary the targets it relies on. With keys held by the owner and the control plane off the public internet, the network is invisible — there is no exposed gateway to scan and no shared, vendor-owned control plane whose compromise cascades to everyone on it. Faction extends that protection to the devices that defenders usually cannot reach:

• OT and IoT — controllers, sensors, and cameras — protected behind US-made, Cyber-Assured Pods and Portals
• Hardware forensically inspected at the chip level and cyber-assured by ORION, with a certified supply chain
• Devices reachable only from inside the network, with every connection cryptographically verified before access
• Mitigation of compromised routers and smart hardware already in place — without rip-and-replace

Against an adversary that has already moved into the supply chain, the strongest answer is to own and control the trust governing your environment — networks, devices, and the connected infrastructure that keeps essential services running.