Our overall aim in this project is to synthesize desired behaviors in populations of bacterial and mammalian cells. To this goal, we define the basis of a next-generation cyber-physical system (CPS) called biological CPS (bioCPS). The enabling technologies are synthetic biology and micron-scale mobile robotics. Synthetic genetic circuits for decision making and local communication among the cells are automatically synthesized using a Bio-Design Automation (BDA) workflow.
Due to increasing use by civil and federal authorities and vast commercial and amateur applications, Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) will be introduced into the National Air Space (NAS); the question is only how we can do this safely. NASA and the FAA are designing a new automated air traffic control system (NextGen) for all aircraft, manned or unmanned. New algorithms and tools need to be developed to enable computation of the complex questions inherent in designing such a system while proving adherence to rigorous safety standards.
This research assesses the threat of cyber-physical attacks to manufacturing systems that change the design of a physical part, elude quality control measures, and result in part failure. This goal is achieved through the development of: a cyber-physical attack taxonomy, framework to assess levels of cyber-physical vulnerability, models to detect and diagnose the presence of attacks in real-time, and side-channel detection techniques specific to manufacturing.
Abstract: Cyber-physical systems have been increasingly subject to cyber-attacks including code injection and code reuse attacks. With the tightly coupled nature of cyber components with the physical domain, these attacks have the potential to cause significant damage if critical applications such as automobiles are compromised. Instruction Set Randomization and Address Space Randomization have been commonly proposed to address these types of attacks.
