Lijing Zhai

(Advisor: Kyriakos G. Vamvoudakis)

will propose a doctoral thesis entitled,

Architectures for Hardening Security in Intelligent Cyber-Physical Systems

On

Thursday, May 13 at 01:00 pm.
https://bluejeans.com/8586695517
 

Abstract
    Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are integrated, hybrid networks of cyber (computation and communication) and physical (sensors, actuators, and controllers) components that interact in a feedback loop with possible human intervention, interaction and utilization. The rapid and widespread application of CPS in modern society has been introducing new vulnerabilities and threats. There is an urgent growing concern for the security of CPS. In this proposal, we will mainly focus on building architectures for hardening security in intelligent CPS.

    First, we will develop a data-driven watermarking-based detection scheme as well as a switching watermarking-based detection scheme against replay attacks. Second, we will design a moving-target defense (MTD) mechanism that maintains nominal performance in the absence of attacks, detects and mitigates attacks while guaranteeing closed-loop system stability in the presence of attacks, with ADP techniques to implement model-free secure optimal feedback policies. Next, we will give a quantitative security metric on linear time-invariant (LTI) systems under sensor and actuator attacks, and then investigate the sensor placement problem by structured model of systems with graph theory. Moreover, we will work on building an efficient cyber deception formulation to characterize the deceptive interactions between a cyber attacker and the defender, and then find efficient algorithms to select optimal defense strategies. Furthermore, we consider feedback systems with asynchronous sensors and controllers to investigate limitations for the offset tolerance between sensors and controllers in terms of stability, and to find detection and mitigation mechanisms of timing attacks.

Committee

• Prof. Kyriakos G. Vamvoudakis – School of Aerospace Engineering (advisor)
• Prof. Wassim M. Haddad – School of Aerospace Engineering
• Prof. Sam Coogan – School of Electrical & Computer Engineering
• Prof. Tamer Başar – College of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign