CPS: Medium: Collaborative Research: Against Coordinated Cyber and Physical Attacks: Unified Theory and Technologies
Lead PI:
Naira Hovakimyan
Co-Pi:
Abstract
Coordinated cyber-physical attacks (CCPA) have been touted as a serious threat for several years, where "coordinated" means that attackers have complete knowledge of the physical plant and status, and sometimes can even create physical defects, to assist cyber attacks, and vice versa. In recent years, these attacks have crept from theory to reality, with attacks on vehicles, electrical grids, and industrial plants, which have the potential to cause destruction and even death outside of the digital world. CCPA raise a unique challenge with respect to cyber-physical systems (CPS) safety. Historically, technologies to defend cyber attacks and physical attacks are developed separately under different assumptions and models. For instance, cyber security technologies often require the complete profile of the physical dynamics and the observation of the system state, which may not be available when physical defects exist. Similarly, existing system control techniques may efficiently compensate for the physical damage, but under the assumption that the control software and the sensor data are not compromised. There is a lack of unified approaches against CCPA. With this observation, this project focuses on the development of unified models with coherent set of assumptions, supported by integrated technologies, upon which CCPA can be defended much more effectively. To establish theoretical foundations and engineering principles for resilient CPS architectures, this project will investigate unified models and platforms that represent the scientific understanding of resilient CPS against CCPA. Engineering of CPS will be addressed through the development and integration of complexity-reduced software architectures, along with their design principles, which lead to verifiable and certifiable architectures with higher level of system resilience. Technology of CPS will be addressed through the design of new attack detection, isolation, and recovery tools as well as timing and control techniques to ensure appropriate responses to CCPA. The proposed inherently interdisciplinary research will ensure predictable performance for resilient CPS, by leveraging the disciplinary advances in (i) the design and evaluation of robust fault-tolerant control systems yielding significantly enhanced levels of safety in highly unpredictable environments; (ii) the design and implementation of complexity reduction architecture yielding a significant reduction in the verification time from hours to seconds; (iii) the development of multi-rate sampled-data control and robust reachability-based attack detection techniques ensuring that the sensor data is reliable; and (iv) the development of cyber-physical co-adaptation that optimizes control performance and computation task scheduling to guarantee system safety and efficient recovery from CCPA. The target application of this project is unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The research results will be evaluated in three different testbeds: UAV testbed, generic transportation model (GTM) aircraft, and power system virtual testbed (VTB). The technological advancement from this project will provide solutions for the safety and reliability issues faced by today's CPS and deliver dependable CPS that are applicable without sacrificing functionality or accessibility in complex and potentially hostile networked environment. The results of this project will be communicated in archival journal publications, conference venues and various workshops and lectures, and will be integrated at different academic levels.
Naira Hovakimyan
<p>Naira Hovakimyan received her MS degree in Theoretical Mechanics and Applied Mathematics in 1988 from Yerevan State University in Armenia. She got her Ph.D. in Physics and Mathematics in 1992, in Moscow, from the Institute of Applied Mathematics of Russian Academy of Sciences, majoring in optimal control and differential games. In 1997 she has been awarded a governmental postdoctoral scholarship to work in INRIA, France. In 1998 she was invited to the School of Aerospace Engineering of Georgia Tech, where she worked as a research faculty member until 2003. In 2003 she joined the Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering of Virginia Tech, and in 2008 she moved to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is a professor, university scholar and Schaller faculty scholar of Mechanical Science and Engineering. She has co-authored a book and more than 250 refereed publications.&nbsp; She is the recipient of the SICE International scholarship for the best paper of a young investigator in the VII ISDG Symposium (Japan, 1996), and also the 2011 recipient of <em>AIAA Mechanics and Control of Flight</em> award. She is an associate fellow and life member of AIAA, a Senior Member of IEEE, and a member of SIAM, AMS and ISDG. Her research interests are in the theory of robust adaptive control and estimation, control in the presence of limited information, networks of autonomous systems, game theory and applications of those in safety-critical systems of aerospace, mechanical, electrical, petroleum and biomedical engineering.</p>
Performance Period: 09/01/2017 - 08/31/2020
Institution: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Sponsor: National Science Foundation
Award Number: 1739732