Cyber Physical Systems Security

Project description

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) comprise the backbone of national critical infrastructure such as power grids, transportation systems, and home automation systems, which are highly interconnected and mutually dependent systems. Such systems support a diverse set of services using a wide variety of Internet of Things (IoT) devices for sensing and actuation. The actions initiated by the service controllers could occasionally lead to conflicts or undesirable, unsafe outcomes both due to inadvertent misconfiguration, attacks on the configuration state, and poorly understood dependencies. Therefore, understanding the semantics of IoT networks and the context of their behaviour is critical to dispose of incorrect configurations and build proactive resilience and a reactive defence against evolving threats. The aim of this research is to provide fundamentally new methods for security-aware modelling, analysis and design of safety-critical systems, addressing the many different physical, functional and logical aspects of these heterogeneous systems in the presence of adversaries. This research will lead to cyber-physical security techniques that exploit the interaction between physical and cyber domains for attack detection and resilient control, and it will give a framework for secure control of CPS that harnesses the power of inductive reasoning and the ability to provide context, particularly during an attack, to improve the overall security guarantees.   For more information, please contact Alireza.

Supervisors research focus

Alireza's research focus is in the area of cyber-physical systems security. He does pen-testing on industrial automation and control systems, an example of which is his recent work on the cybersecurity of water quality management systems under a Defence pre-accelerator program named D.Start. Alireza is a board member of the IEEE Consumer Technology Society's publications and is the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Consumer Technology Society's World Newsletter. He has served on the editorial board of several IEEE journals and transactions, including the IEEE Transactions on Consumer Technology, IEEE IoT Journal, IEEE Sensors Journal, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, and IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications. He has served as a program co-Chair, a track Chair, a session Chair, and a Technical Program Committee member, for major conferences, including IEEE TrustCom and IEEE ICCCN.

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