Security for systems where software controls physical processes: water treatment, power grids, robots. Attacks usually aim at a physical outcome (overflowing a tank, tripping a breaker), so defenders can monitor the physical process as well as the network.
Work at iTrust
- Orthogonal defence (Argus, the patent): monitor the plant independently of the control system you’re protecting.
- Command validation (PCAT): check what a PLC is about to tell an actuator before it happens.
- Ensembles of detectors (Super Detector).
- Exercises (CPX design): CISS, CIDEX, and NATO CCDCOE’s Locked Shields and Crossed Swords.
Most of this happened on the SWaT testbed.
Invariants
Much of the iTrust work rests on process invariants: physical rules a plant must obey, checked at runtime. They can be written from the design (Adepu and Mathur), mined from logs (Umer and others, who find neither source is enough alone), or now drafted by an LLM from plant documents (INVARLLM). I went back over this from the student’s side in Secure Cyber-Physical Systems.
Relevance to robots
A robot team is a mobile, networked cyber-physical system. See multi-robot systems, Byzantine fault tolerance, robot security and runtime monitoring.