VU SoS Lablet Quarterly Executive Summary - October 2018

A. Fundamental Research

The Science of Security for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Lablet focuses on (1) Foundations of CPS Resilience, (2) Analytics for CPS Cybersecurity and (3) Development of a Multi-model Testbed for Simulation–based Evaluation of Resilience.

• We considered the problem of adversarial attacks against CPS with learning-enabled components and investigated how to detect stealthy attacks using a game theoretic framework. The approach is evaluated using simulations of CPS and it is shown that it can improve system resilience without significantly increasing the false alarm rate.
• The project sequestered the key policy documents that are related to smart grid cybersecurity. (NISTIR 7628 - Guidelines for smart grid cybersecurity - is the central document). A detailed study is being conducted to identify the key pieces/elements pieces for implementation of cybersecurity measures. The team has begun formalizing the rules for extraction of data from text and has completed a validation study to test the scalability, portability, and transposability of the rules to another policy domains.
• The development of the multi-model testbed included multiple experiments in two CPS domains. In the transportation domain, the experiments incorporate vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) technology to minimize the response time of emergency vehicles. In the power domain, the focus is on vulnerabilities in the electricity market infrastructure and how they can affect the power grid. Models in both domains are integrated with cyber-attacks and courses-of-actions models for performing security and resilience studies.

B. Community Engagement(s)

• Participation in the 9th annual Computational Cybersecurity in Compromised Environments (C3E) workshop including two student research posters focusing on security and resilience problems in CPS with learning-enabled components.
• Our research was presented and the testbed was demonstrated at the Fujitsu System Integration Laboratory in Tokyo, Japan in September 2018

C. Educational Advances

Document the technology behind RoboScape and the hands-on curriculum which aims at making key ideas in CPS security accessible to high school students using a collaborative network robotics environment.