Explanation of Demonstration: The central objective of the proposed research is to transform the CPS-VO from a collaboration platform and passive repository of information into an active resource that provides access to tools and methods emerging from the CPS research community. The project will make a significant contribution to education via support to student competitions that will help prepare a new generation of students who will be inspired and trained to realize the promise of CPS.

The exponential growth of information and communication technologies have caused a profound shift in the way humans engineer systems leading to the emergence of closed-loop systems involving strong integration and coordination of physical and cyber components, often referred to as cyber-physical systems (CPSs). Because of these disruptive changes, physical systems can now be attacked through cyberspace and cyberspace can be attacked through physical means.

This research assesses the threat of cyber-physical attacks to manufacturing systems that change the design of a physical part, elude quality control measures, and result in part failure. This goal is achieved through the development of: a cyber-physical attack taxonomy, framework to assess levels of cyber-physical vulnerability, models to detect and diagnose the presence of attacks in real-time, and side-channel detection techniques specific to manufacturing.

Abstract: Cyber-physical systems have been increasingly subject to cyber-attacks including code injection and code reuse attacks. With the tightly coupled nature of cyber components with the physical domain, these attacks have the potential to cause significant damage if critical applications such as automobiles are compromised. Instruction Set Randomization and Address Space Randomization have been commonly proposed to address these types of attacks.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are being increasingly deployed in critical infrastructures such as electric-power, water, transportation, and other networks. These deployments are facilitating real-time monitoring and closed-loop control by exploiting the advances in wireless sensor-actuator networks, the internet of “everything,” data-driven analytics, and machine-to-machine interfaces. CPS operations depend on the synergy of computational and physical components.