A cyber-physical system (CPS) is a system featuring a tight combination of and coordination between the system’s computational and physical elements. Today, a pre-cursor generation of cyber-physical systems can be found in areas as diverse as emerging and future combat systems, air-space-cyber activities, as well as smart buildings, bridges, and other structures. To interact with physical systems, the geographically distributed sensors, actuators, and controllers are interconnected via the communication networks. In particular, sensor nodes obtain measurements from the physical world and send data to the controller through computer networks. The controller then obtains the states of physical systems and sends control commands to the actuators to adjust its operation. Before CPSs can be used, the security of CPS’s must be fully understood and addressed. There are a few challenges. First, the military CPS’s may operate in hostile environments. The middleware, infrastructures, and payloads lacking tamper resistance hardware may increase the possibility to be compromised and further disrupt the mission of CPS’s. Second, the next generation CPS’s must interwork with existing physical infrastructures, which are composed a large number of legacy devices such as onboard processing and network control payloads. Those legacy devices were developed many years ago and do not have appropriate security mechanisms in place. Third, the next generation CPS generally demands high performance guarantee with real-time requirements to enable operation stability. Hence, design and development of effective and low cost defensive mechanisms to detect and localize malicious devices become critical issues in CPS.

 

key words

Large-scale cyber networks; Threat models; Vulnerabilities; Malicious devices; Security; Operation stability; Defense modeling and simulation;

Citizenship:  Open to U.S. citizens

Level:  Open to Postdoctoral and Senior applicants