CPS: Breakthrough: Towards a Science of Attack Composition, Mitigation and Verification in Cyber Physical Systems: A Passivity B

Abstract:

Cyber--physical systems (CPS) have become increasingly prevalent in applications including health care, energy, and transportation. The tight coupling between cyber and physical components of CPS implies that cyber--attacks can degrade the safety, availability, and performance of physical components. The cyber components also introduce multiple entry points to the CPS, lowering the cost of attacks compared to purely physical systems. When one or more attacks occur simultaneously, a scientific approach is needed for modeling and composing the attacks and developing effective mitigation strategies. Currently, however, developing such an approach is an open research problem in the Science and Technology of CPS domain. The objective of this research effort is a passivity--based framework for modeling, composing, and mitigating attacks on cyber--physical systems, as well as bisimulation verification of models and mitigation. Passivity is an energy dissipation property of dynamical systems that provides basic rules for composition and analysis of interconnected systems. The proposed effort will address the following problems: (a) How to develop passive dynamical models of attacks, as well as characterize the class of attacks that admit a passive representation? ; (b) How to compose passive adversary models, as well as decompose composed adversary model to identify basic attack primitives and mitigation strategies? (c) How to verify the composed adversary models and mitigation strategies through techniques including approximate bisimulation? Our framework will be validated through experimentation and prototyping, and will be integrated into K--12, undergraduate, and graduate education.