Analysis, Design, and Operation of Secure Cyber-Physical Systems

Today’s cyber-physical systems are the building blocks of smart and citizen-centric applications that will revolutionize the way people interact with the urban environment. Smart systems, cities, and communities will emerge, in which advanced levels of autonomy hold the promise of greater efficiency, reliability and sustainability in areas of national interest and social need, such as health, energy, and transportation. In this new realm of applications, however, enhanced connectivity and advanced autonomy will also pose novel and significant risks to people and the infrastructure, including safety, security, and privacy.

In this talk, I present a unified framework for the analysis of fundamental vulnerabilities affecting cyber-physical systems, the design of targeted detection and protection schemes, and the construction of systems that are provably resilient to accidental malfunctions and malicious attacks. I show how cyber-physical security differs from well-established disciplines, including cyber security and fault tolerance, and how our control- and graph-theoretic methods complement existing security practices to fully protect cyber-physical systems. Further, I reveal a novel class of integrity attacks against smart power grids, and show how these attacks lead to the formulation of novel sparse network control problems, which we also solve. Finally, I discuss directions of future research and open questions in cyber-physical security.