Resilient Architectures

The goals of this project are to develop the principles and methods for designing and analyzing resilient CPS architectures that deliver required service in the face of compromised components. A fundamental challenge is to understand the basic tenets of CPS resilience and how they can be used in developing resilient architectures. The proposed approach integrates redundancy, diversity, and hardening methods for designing either passive resilience methods that are inherently robust against attacks and active resilience methods that allow responding to attacks.

The key to realizing the smart functionalities envisioned through the Internet of Things (IoT) is to securely and efficiently communicate, store, and make sense of the tremendous data generated by IoT devices. Therefore, integrating IoT with the cloud platform for its computing and big data analysis capabilities becomes increasingly important, since IoT devices are computational units with strict performance and energy constraints. However, when data is transferred among interconnected devices or to the cloud, new security and privacy issues arise.

We believe that diversity and redundancy can help us prevent an attacker from hiding all of his or her traces. Therefore, we will strategically deploy diverse security monitors and build a set of techniques to combine information originating at the monitors. We have shown that we can formulate monitor deployment as a constrained optimization problem wherein the objective function is the utility of monitors in detecting intrusions.

Effective response to security attacks often requires a combination of both automated and human-mediated actions. Currently we lack adequate methods to reason about such human-system coordination, including ways to determine when to allocate tasks to each party and how to gain assurance that automated mechanisms are appropriately aligned with organizational needs and policies.