Biblio

Securing Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) against cyber-attacks is challenging due to the wide range of possible attacks - from stealthy ones that seek to manipulate/drop/delay control and measurement signals to malware that infects host machines that control the physical process. This has prompted the research community to address this problem through developing targeted methods that protect and check the run-time operation of the CPS. Since protecting signals and checking for errors result in performance penalties, they must be performed within the delay bounds dictated by the control loop. Due to the large number of potential checks that can be performed, coupled with various degrees of their effectiveness to detect a wide range of attacks, strategic assignment of these checks in the control loop is a critical endeavor. To that end, this paper presents a coherent runtime framework - which we coin BLOC - for orchestrating the CPS with check blocks to secure them against cyber attacks. BLOC capitalizes on game theoretical techniques to enable the defender to find an optimal randomized use of check blocks to secure the CPS while respecting the control-loop constraints. We develop a Stackelberg game model for stateless blocks and a Markov game model for stateful ones and derive optimal policies that minimize the worst-case damage from rational adversaries. We validate our models through extensive simulations as well as a real implementation for a HVAC system.

In this demonstration, we showcase the XD middleware, a framework for expressive multiplexing of application communication streams onto underlying device-to-device communication links. XD allows applications to remain agnostic about which low-level networking stack is actually delivering messages and instead focus on the application-level content and delivery parameters. The IoT space has been flooded with new communication technologies (e.g., BLE, ZigBee, 6LoWPAN) to add to those already available on modern mobile devices (e.g., BLE, WiFi-Direct), substantially increasing the barrier to entry for developing innovative IoT applications. XD presents application developers with a simple publish-subscribe API for sending and receiving data streams, unburdening them from the task of selecting and coordinating communication channels. Our demonstration shows two Android applications, Disseminate and Prophet, running using our XD middleware for communication. We implemented BLE, WiFi Direct with TCP, and WiFi Direct with UDP communication stacks underneath XD.