Collaborative Research: CPS: Medium: Secure CPS for Real-time Agro-analytics
Lead PI:
Aniket Kate
Abstract
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) have now started to play an increasingly important role in autonomous sensing, analysis, and tasking in a variety of agricultural settings ranging from sustainable farming to livestock monitoring. Many of these settings demand real-time analytics, at varying timescales, and the CPS devices have to coordinate among themselves over a variety of wireless networks. As various actors in these settings---from farmers to big agro companies---have much to gain from manipulating the results of these distributed systems, it is important to make these systems fault-tolerant and secure. This project, COPIA, seeks to provide the fundamental secure distributed computing primitives tailored for real-time agro-analytics in the face of malicious faults and network failures. Despite more than four decades of work on secure distributed computing, this CPS domain introduces new requirements that COPIA will address through fundamental innovations. First, COPIA will incorporate a principled framework for comparing energy costs of protocols and deriving optimal choices of cryptographic primitives to optimize energy use. This framework will permit leveraging CPS-specific opportunities, e.g., the difficulty for an adversary to equivocate (or offer two conflicting statements to two different neighbours) due to the omnidirectional nature of wireless links. Second, COPIA will achieve consensus in dynamic networks, i.e., where CPS nodes are mobile (e.g., drones). The technical challenge here is that the communication graph of nodes dynamically changes; most existing work assumes graph connectivity is unchanging throughout the execution of the protocol. Third, COPIA will address privacy in these distributed computing protocols, as the farmers are increasingly worried about companies extracting trade secrets from sensor data. This thrust involves hardening distributed computing protocols so that a limited number of node compromises does not divulge secrets. Overall, COPIA will make vital steps toward building novel, secure distributed CPS solutions for real-time analytics by addressing significant sources of safety, privacy, and availability vulnerabilities with the current CPS solutions. The project formulates an integrated research agenda that couples a strong theoretical component with an ambitious systems research component. As the importance of precision agriculture and the associated cybersecurity threat and potential vulnerabilities grow, the proposed principled approach will become a necessity for secure real-time agro-analytics.The team will demonstrate the innovations on experimental farms at Purdue University, secure embedded testbeds consisting of heterogenous embedded nodes at lab-scale, and on data from commercial livestock IoT monitoring deployments. Through these demonstrations, COPIA will energize a student community working on security of distributed embedded systems, and a community of farmers who realize profitability and environmental sustainability, e.g., reduced fertilizer use, early detection of livestock anomalies, and improved reliability and security of their monitoring systems.
Performance Period: 02/15/2021 - 02/14/2024
Institution: Purdue University
Sponsor: USDA
Award Number: 2038986