Biblio
As the Industrial Internet of Things (IIot) becomes more prevalent in critical application domains, ensuring security and resilience in the face of cyber-attacks is becoming an issue of paramount importance. Cyber-attacks against critical infrastructures, for example, against smart water-distribution and transportation systems, pose serious threats to public health and safety. Owing to the severity of these threats, a variety of security techniques are available. However, no single technique can address the whole spectrum of cyber-attacks that may be launched by a determined and resourceful attacker. In light of this, we consider a multi-pronged approach for designing secure and resilient IIoT systems, which integrates redundancy, diversity, and hardening techniques. We introduce a framework for quantifying cyber-security risks and optimizing IIoT design by determining security investments in redundancy, diversity, and hardening. To demonstrate the applicability of our framework, we present two case studies in water distribution and transportation a case study in water-distribution systems. Our numerical evaluation shows that integrating redundancy, diversity, and hardening can lead to reduced security risk at the same cost.
Traffic signals were originally standalone hardware devices running on fixed schedules, but by now, they have evolved into complex networked systems. As a consequence, traffic signals have become susceptible to attacks through wireless interfaces or even remote attacks through the Internet. Indeed, recent studies have shown that many traffic lights deployed in practice have easily exploitable vulnerabilities, which allow an attacker to tamper with the configuration of the signal. Due to hardware-based failsafes, these vulnerabilities cannot be used to cause accidents. However, they may be used to cause disastrous traffic congestions. Building on Daganzo's well-known traffic model, we introduce an approach for evaluating vulnerabilities of transportation networks, identifying traffic signals that have the greatest impact on congestion and which, therefore, make natural targets for attacks. While we prove that finding an attack that maximally impacts congestion is NP-hard, we also exhibit a polynomial-time heuristic algorithm for computing approximately optimal attacks. We then use numerical experiments to show that our algorithm is extremely efficient in practice. Finally, we also evaluate our approach using the SUMO traffic simulator with a real-world transportation network, demonstrating vulnerabilities of this network. These simulation results extend the numerical experiments by showing that our algorithm is extremely efficient in a microsimulation model as well.
Monitoring large areas using sensors is fundamental in a number of applications, including electric power grid, traffic networks, and sensor-based pollution control systems. However, the number of sensors that can be deployed is often limited by financial or technological constraints. This problem is further complicated by the presence of strategic adversaries, who may disable some of the deployed sensors in order to impair the operator's ability to make predictions. Assuming that the operator employs a Gaussian-process-based regression model, we formulate the problem of attack-resilient sensor placement as the problem of selecting a subset from a set of possible observations, with the goal of minimizing the uncertainty of predictions. We show that both finding an optimal resilient subset and finding an optimal attack against a given subset are NP-hard problems. Since both the design and the attack problems are computationally complex, we propose efficient heuristic algorithms for solving them and present theoretical approximability results. Finally, we show that the proposed algorithms perform exceptionally well in practice using numerical results based on real-world datasets.