HTX Chief Executive Chan Tsan speaking on a panel at the Securing Smart Cities event at Singapore International Cyber Week 2025. (Photo: HTX/Nicole Lim)
HTX Chief Executive Chan Tsan gave a resounding call to action during his speech at Singapore International Cyber Week (SICW) on 22 Oct 2025, inviting members of the global cybersecurity community to test the resiliency of the agency’s tech, including humanoid robots, at the inaugural DEF CON Singapore event next year.
Tsan made the remarks during the Securing Smart Cities event that was part of SICW, emphasising the importance of cybersecurity resilience and rigorous testing. The event was themed "Cyber-Physical Risks Management in Autonomous Mobile Robots, Humanoids, and Autonomous Vehicles".
“Our aim is to open up Home Team systems like our robots, our humanoids, to the cyber security community (during DEF CON Singapore). So, this is my invitation to the entire community – come break our systems. If you can bring them down, good. We’ll learn and be stronger for it,” he said.
Relentless testing, he pointed out, is just one of the key approaches HTX will adopt to ensure resilience against cyber physical risks.
We will test relentlessly. We will build systems, we will break them and make them more secure. The only system that HTX and the Home Team will ever deploy is the one that has survived attempts to destroy it.
On this note, Tsan shared that HTX recently unveiled Garage@HTX, Singapore’s first purpose-built engineering Developmental Testing and Evaluation (DT&E) facility for public safety. HTX’s Home Team Humanoid Robotics Centre (H2RC), which is slated to be unveiled next year, will also play a crucial role in the testing and development of embodied AI for public safety use cases.
(From left to right) Sim Feng-Ji, Deputy Secretary (Digital Development) at the Ministry of Digital Development and Information (MDDI), Mark du Plessis, Cyber Partner, Deloitte SEA, HTX CE Chan Tsan, and Ken Chan, Vice President (Business Development) at Moovita. (Photo: HTX/Nicole Lim)
He then shared that one key motivation behind HTX’s artificial intelligence (AI) movement, which was launched in June 2024, is to better understand the tech so as to build deep capabilities and meaningful solutions for the Home Team, such as the recently launched Report Lodging Co-Pilot, or R-COP, which is now available at seven police division headquarters.
Such expertise, he noted, will be critical because AI is a double-edged sword.
“AI is a force multiplier for the good guys as well as the bad guys. And many would argue that it's a greater force multiplier for the bad guys because they don't need to bother about AI governance and guardrails. AI is also an attack vector in its own right. It can be poisoned and manipulated to disastrous effects,” he explained.
Developed in-house by HTX and the Singapore Police Force, R-COP is an AI-enabled chatbot designed to assist the public in lodging police reports. It is currently available at self-help kiosks located within SPF’s seven police division headquarters. (Photo: HTX/Alywin Chew)
Tsan also shared with the audience that HTX recently operationalised the Home Team AI governance playbook and is working to develop a risk management framework for robotics and drones.
He then spoke on a panel at the event alongside Mark du Plessis, Cyber Partner, Deloitte SEA, and Ken Chan, Vice President (Business Development) at Moovita. The panel was moderated by Sim Feng-Ji, Deputy Secretary (Digital Development) at the Ministry of Digital Development and Information (MDDI).
When asked about his fellow panellist’s open invitation to hack HTX’s tech at DEF CON Singapore, du Plessis was effusive in his support for such an approach, noting that this is the best way to ensure that something is highly secure against cyber-physical threats.
“Hack it to shreds. Hack it until it can’t move anymore,” he quipped. “Once you’ve broken it, fix it, then hack it again. Because once you’ve proven that it works, it works.”
DEF CON is widely considered the world’s largest hacking and cybersecurity conference. HTX is bringing DEF CON to Singapore for the first time, from 28-30 April 2026, together with strategic partner Centre for Strategic Infocomm Technologies (CSIT).
DEF CON Singapore will take place at the same time as the Milipol TechX Summit 2026, the landmark event for the international public safety community.
