CAREER: Foundations for Secure Control of Cyber-Physical Systems

Explanation of Demonstration: Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are commonly supervisory control systems where a human-on-the-loop (HOL) supervises one or more autonomous systems, and the embedded autonomy allows the operators to intermittently attend to the system while they attend to other tasks. Thus, it is imperative that the design of any security-aware CPS considers the human factor – i.e., the impact of the interaction between humans and the system on security guarantees. Yet, there has been very little work on design of Human-CPS that promotes human situational awareness for enhanced system performance, particularly in terms of cyber-physical security and real-time defense against attacks. One of the main obstacles in rapidly advancing this line of research is almost a complete lack of available testbeds for evaluating security-aware interactions between humans and CPS. Thus, we developed RESCHU-SA, an extendable virtual platform that facilitates studying the impact that HOL has on the security of CPS with varying levels of autonomy. RESCHU-SA allows users to analyze how the human power of inductive reasoning and ability to provide context, particularly during an attack, affects the overall CPS security guarantees.