UIUC SoS Lablet Quarterly Executive Summary - January 2021
A. Fundamental Research
High level report of result or partial result that helped move security science forward-- In most cases it should point to a "hard problem". These are the most important research accomplishments of the Lablet in the previous quarter.
[Project: An Automated Synthesis Framework for Network Security Resilience]
- A paper describing the work on self-healing network management, addressing the resilient architecture hard problem, was published at the IEEE SmartGridComm’20 and we received the Best Paper Award in the current quarter.
- In the current quarter, we are conducting large-scale evaluation experiments on our proposed distribution service restoration algorithm with a power system consisting of thousands of buses. We are preparing a manuscript describing this work for the IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid.
- A paper describing work on the development of a simulation-based platform for cyber-physical system resilience and security evaluation has been accepted by ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS).
[Project: A Monitoring Fusion and Response Framework to Provide Cyber Resiliency] This quarter, we presented our work titled Smart Metamodels for Sensitivity Analysis and Uncertainty Quantification of AMI Models at SmartGridComm and published it in the conference proceedings. We received valuable feedback during the conference and gave people the opportunity to learn more about this novel technique for indirect SA and UQ. Furthermore, one person who attended the conference gave us a high-quality quantitative security model which we intend to use as a test case for our method. We are continuing our efforts to investigate whether an adaptive sampling query-by-committee approach can improve the construction of metamodels which can be used to perform faster sensitivity analysis and uncertainty quantification.
[Project: Uncertainty in Security Analysis] We continue to explore simulation-based techniques for rare event estimation of high-impact low-probability security events. The “minimization of maximum weight” technique proposed in the previous quarter outperformed the mindset-maxprob technique in the given case study but it assumed a simplistic form of proposal distribution, in which the input random variables are independently distributed. Our main effort was spent on finding parametric forms of joint distributions to describe the rare event space and to use them as proposal distributions. The copula-based method using Archimedean and Gaussian copulas suffers from weight degeneracy as the copula-based distributions have thinner left tails than the left tail of the optimal distribution. The technique we are exploring uses mixture distribution, which has been successfully used in adaptive importance sampling such as population Monte Carlo technique and its variations.
[Project: Resilient Control of Cyber-Physical Systems with Distributed Learning] We have formulated a new direction of scientific enquiry into safety and security analysis of autonomous and cyber-physical systems. The approach relies on distributed and sample-efficient optimization techniques that have been developed in the context of the Multi-armed bandit problem. We have shown how these optimization algorithms can be used effectively for statistical model checking of markov decision processes and hybrid systems. We have built a suite of benchmarks related to online safety analysis of autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles. Our initial results are very promising as the data usage and the running time of our algorithms can be several orders of magnitude better than existing model checking approaches such as Storm and Prism. Two PhD students are dedicating their research time to the project and the prototype tool has been made available online.
B. Community Engagement(s)
Research interaction in the community including workshops, seminars, competitions, etc.
Publications
- M. Rausch and W.H. Sanders. Stacked Metamodels for Sensitivity Analysis and Uncertainty Quantification of AMI Models. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Communications, Control, and Computing Technologies for Smart Grids (SmartGridComm), 2020.
- Yanfeng Qu, Gong Chen, Xin Liu, Jiaqi Yan, Bo Chen, and Dong Jin. Cyber-Resilience Enhancement of PMU Networks Using Software-Defined Networking. The 2020 IEEE International Conference on Communications, Control, and Computing Technologies for Smart Grids (SmartGridComm), November 2020.
C. Educational Advances
Impact to courses or curriculum at your school or elsewhere that indicates an increased training or rigor in security research.
None to report this quarter.