Title: Foundations of security in cyber-physical systems

Abstract: Cyber-physical systems (CPS) such as automobiles, electrical grids, transportation networks and water networks, are increasingly controlled through (distributed) cyber-systems, which make them vulnerable to attacks. To secure CPS systems, just protecting bits (cyber-security) is insufficient: a sensor attack can feed wrong inputs to sensors and thus manipulate the physical signals before they get converted to bits. By drawing insights from error correction, we develop CPS defense strategies that leverage the physical dynamics of CPS to protect against attacks. We demonstrate such strategies for the state estimation problem in the presence of attacks on sensors and actuators. We characterize the resilience of the system, which corresponds to the maximum number of attacks that can be tolerated while successfully reconstructing the state from observations. When there is measurement and process noise, these ideas enable design of (optimal) MMSE estimation under adversarial attacks. We also propose computationally feasible state estimators for these problems. For the problem of designing output-feedback controllers that stabilize the system, we show that a principle of separation between estimation and control holds, even when there are adversarial attacks. We conclude the talk with ideas on how to develop secure active sensing, which could protect against individual sensor attacks in the context of anti-lock brake (ABS) sensors.

 Parts of this talk are joint work with S. Mishra, Y. Shoukry, H. Fawzi, Y.Yona, M. Showkatbaksh, P. Tabuada, and M. Srivastava.

 Bio:

Suhas N. Diggavi received the B. Tech. degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, in 1998. After completing his Ph.D., he was a Principal Member Technical Staff in the Information Sciences Center, AT&T Shannon Laboratories, Florham Park, NJ. After that he was on the faculty of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences, EPFL, where he directed the Laboratory for Information and Communication Systems (LICOS). He is currently a Professor, in the Department of Electrical Engineering, at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he directs the Information Theory and Systems laboratory. His research interests include wireless network information theory, wireless networking systems, network data compression and network algorithms; more information can be found at http://licos.ee.ucla.edu. He has received several recognitions for his research including the 2013 IEEE Information Theory Society & Communications Society Joint Paper Award, the 2013 ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MobiHoc) best paper award, the 2006 IEEE Donald Fink prize paper award. He is currently a Distinguished  Lecturer and also serves on board of governors for the IEEE Information theory society. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. He has been an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, ACM/IEEE Transactions on Networking, IEEE Communication Letters, a guest editor for IEEE Selected Topics in Signal Processing and in the program committees of several IEEE conferences. He has also helped organize IEEE conferences including serving as the Technical Program Co-Chair for 2012 IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW) and the Technical Program Co-Chair for the 2015 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT). He has 8 issued patents.