Biblio
Modern critical infrastructures are increasingly turning into distributed, complex Cyber-Physical systems that need proactive protection and fast restoration to mitigate physical or cyber incidents or attacks. Addressing the need for early stage threat detection against physical intrusion, the paper presents two physical security sensors developed within the DEFENDER project for detecting the intrusion of drones and humans using video analytics. The continuous stream of media data obtained from the region of vulnerability and proximity is processed using Region based Fully Connected Neural Network deep-learning model. The novelty of the pro-posed system relies in the processing of multi-threaded media input streams for achieving real-time threat identification. The video analytics solution has been validated using NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 for drone detection and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q Design for detecting human intruders. The experimental test bed for the validation of the proposed system has been constructed to include environments and situations that are commonly faced by critical infrastructure operators such as the area of protection, tradeoff between angle of coverage against distance of coverage.
In recent years, humanoid robots have become quite ubiquitous finding wide applicability in many different fields, spanning from education to entertainment and assistance. They can be considered as more complex cyber-physical systems (CPS) and, as such, they are exposed to the same vulnerabilities. This can be very dangerous for people acting that close with these robots, since attackers by exploiting their vulnerabilities, can not only violate people's privacy, but, more importantly, they can command the robot behavior causing them bodily harm, thus leading to devastating consequences. In this paper, we propose a solution not yet investigated in this field, which relies on the use of secure enclaves, which in our opinion could represent a valuable solution for coping with most of the possible attacks, while suggesting developers to adopt such a precaution during the robot design phase.
Verifying complex Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is increasingly important given the push to deploy safety-critical autonomous features. Unfortunately, traditional verification methods do not scale to the complexity of these systems and do not provide systematic methods to protect verified properties when not all the components can be verified. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a real-time mixed-trust computing framework that combines verification and protection. The framework introduces a new task model, where an application task can have both an untrusted and a trusted part. The untrusted part allows complex computations supported by a full OS with a realtime scheduler running in a VM hosted by a trusted hypervisor. The trusted part is executed by another scheduler within the hypervisor and is thus protected from the untrusted part. If the untrusted part fails to finish by a specific time, the trusted part is activated to preserve safety (e.g., prevent a crash) including its timing guarantees. This framework is the first allowing the use of untrusted components for CPS critical functions while preserving logical and timing guarantees, even in the presence of malicious attackers. We present the framework design and implementation along with the schedulability analysis and the coordination protocol between the trusted and untrusted parts. We also present our Raspberry Pi 3 implementation along with experiments showing the behavior of the system under failures of untrusted components, and a drone application to demonstrate its practicality.
Modern cyber-physical systems are increasingly complex and vulnerable to attacks like false data injection aimed at destabilizing and confusing the systems. We develop and evaluate an attack-detection framework aimed at learning a dynamic invariant network, data-driven temporal causal relationships between components of cyber-physical systems. We evaluate the relative performance in attack detection of the proposed model relative to traditional anomaly detection approaches. In this paper, we introduce Granger Causality based Kalman Filter with Adaptive Robust Thresholding (G-KART) as a framework for anomaly detection based on data-driven functional relationships between components in cyber-physical systems. In particular, we select power systems as a critical infrastructure with complex cyber-physical systems whose protection is an essential facet of national security. The system presented is capable of learning with or without network topology the task of detection of false data injection attacks in power systems. Kalman filters are used to learn and update the dynamic state of each component in the power system and in-turn monitor the component for malicious activity. The ego network for each node in the invariant graph is treated as an ensemble model of Kalman filters, each of which captures a subset of the node's interactions with other parts of the network. We finally also introduce an alerting mechanism to surface alerts about compromised nodes.
With the increasing interest in studying Automated Driving System (ADS)-equipped vehicles through simulation, there is a growing need for comprehensive and agile middleware to provide novel Virtual Analysis (VA) functions of ADS-equipped vehicles towards enabling a reliable representation for pre-deployment test. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Universal Cyber-physical systems Environment for Federation (UCEF) is such a VA environment. It provides Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) capable of ensuring synchronized interactions across multiple simulation platforms such as LabVIEW, OMNeT++, Ricardo IGNITE, and Internet of Things (IoT) platforms. UCEF can aid engineers and researchers in understanding the impact of different constraints associated with complex cyber-physical systems (CPS). In this work UCEF is used to produce a simulated Operational Domain Design (ODD) for ADS-equipped vehicles where control (drive cycle/speed pattern), sensing (obstacle detection, traffic signs and lights), and threats (unusual signals, hacked sources) are represented as UCEF federates to simulate a drive cycle and to feed it to vehicle dynamics simulators (e.g. OpenModelica or Ricardo IGNITE) through the Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI). In this way we can subject the vehicle to a wide range of scenarios, collect data on the resulting interactions, and analyze those interactions using metrics to understand trustworthiness impact. Trustworthiness is defined here as in the NIST Framework for Cyber-Physical Systems, and is comprised of system reliability, resiliency, safety, security, and privacy. The goal of this work is to provide an example of an experimental design strategy using Fractional Factorial Design for statistically assessing the most important safety metrics in ADS-equipped vehicles.