Foundations of Secure Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract:

Critical physical infrastructures, such as electrical grids and water networks etc., are increasingly controlled through a distributed cyber-systems which make it vulnerable to attacks. This project is devoted to developing the foundations of security of such cyber-physical systems. The premise of this project is that just cyber-security is not sufficient to secure such physical systems. We take a holistic view by utilizing the properties of physical systems to design new secure protocols and architectures for cyber-physical systems (CPS) through a unified conceptual framework, which uses models for the physical system and the communication/ computation network to design algorithms and protocols with provable operational security guarantees. In its second year, this project has made several important contributions on this topic of secure cyber-physical systems. These include (1) Secure state estimation and control (2) Noninvasive ABS Sensor Spoofing Attack (3) Control For Cyber-Physical Systems Under Network Packet Scheduling Attacks (4) Network message security (5) Interactive wireless security (6) Quantize-Map-Forward Relaying (7) Authentication and signatures (8) Construction of pseudo-random generators and its applications (9) Privacy Concerns in Distributed Control. In the poster, we will describe a subset of the main research activities that the team undertook in the past year.