Foundations for Secure Control of Cyber-Physical Systems

The increasing set of functionalities, network interoperability, and system design complexity have introduced security vulnerabilities in cyber-physical systems (CPS). As recently demonstrated, a remote attacker can disrupt the operation of a car to either disable the vehicle or hijack it. High-profile security incidents in other CPS domains include a large-scale attack on Ukraine's power-grid and the StuxNet attack on an industrial system, while the RQ-170 Sentinel drone capture has shown that even safety-critical military CPS can be compromised. The tight integration of information technology and physical components has made CPS vulnerable to attack vectors well beyond the standard cyber-attacks. In addition, deep component embedding and long projected system lifetime limit the use of standard cyber security solutions that impose a significant computation and communication overhead. On the other hand, the safety-critical interaction with the physical world has made attacks on CPS extremely dangerous as they could result in significant physical damage and even loss of life. To address these challenges, this project will develop scientific foundations for design of secure control of CPS, resulting in a high-assurance CPS design framework in which a mix of attack-resilient control, security-aware human-CPS interactions, efficient controller instrumentation and system recovery provides safety and performance guarantees even in the presence of attacks.

The goal of this project it to provide fundamentally new methods for security-aware modeling, analysis and design of safety-critical CPS, addressing the many different physical, functional and logical aspects of these heterogeneous systems in the presence of attacks. Specific research products include: 1) Cyberphysical security techniques that exploit the interaction between physical and cyber domains for attack-detection and resilient control; 2) Framework for secure control of Human-CPS that harnesses the human power of inductive reasoning and the ability to provide context, particularly during an attack, to improve the overall security guarantees; 3) Platform support for implementation of secure CPS controllers including design techniques and tools ensuring safe and efficient closed-loop recovery. Proposed high-assurance design framework will be used to develop security-aware automotive controllers for connected and autonomous vehicles with varying levels of autonomy and human supervision. Various components of the proposed research will be directly evaluated on relevant automotive applications and architectures, which will facilitate their transition into practice and immediate industrial impact. Furthermore, the general nature of the design framework provides a direct path for this research to have significant impact in other CPS domains leading to design of secure and safety-preserving CPS. The project also has an extensive education and outreach component, including curriculum development for high-assurance CPS with a strong systems and multidisciplinary perspective, expansion of hands-on research opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students, and cooperation with industry. These efforts are strongly motivated by industrial need to provide high-assurance for safety-critical CPS, and thus the results of this project will directly impact the way these systems are designed as well as education of the next generation workforce necessary to support evolution of safe and secure CPS.