(See also the personal webpage of our group members)
(For a full list of publications, see below, and see also the personal webpage of our group members)
Networked Control Systems (NCSs) are integral to many critical infrastructures such as power grids, transportation, and production systems. The resilient operation of such NCS against cyber-attacks is essential for society, and risk management presents an effective framework for addressing these security challenges. The risk management framework encompasses two steps: risk assessment and risk mitigation. The risk assessment step aims to quantify the risk, whereas the risk mitigation step focuses on designing mitigation strategies. This thesis leverages the risk management framework to analyze and design NCSs that are resilient to cyber-attacks. In particular, this thesis aims to address the following research challenges. Firstly, we aim to assess the risk of attack scenarios that are realistic (risk assessment step). In particular, we consider adversaries and operators with different levels of knowledge about the NCS. For instance, an adversary or operator may possess complete knowledge of the system dynamics or have only partial knowledge with varying degrees of uncertainty. Hence, we describe a systematic approach to assess the risk considering the interplay between the knowledge levels of adversaries and operators. Secondly, we aim to design the NCS to minimize the risk of attacks (risk mitigation step). We explore three different strategies to minimize the risk: (a) controller/detector design, (b) security measure allocation, and (c) system architecture design. In the first strategy, we design the controller and detector gains to minimize the risk of attacks. Here, risk is characterized by the performance loss caused by stealthy attacks on the NCS. In the second strategy, we consider a distributed NCS where certain distributed devices can be secured from attacks by deploying secure sensors and actuators. Then, we aim to strategically determine the devices to secure and mitigate the risk of attacks effectively. Finally, inspired by digital watermarking, we explore the idea of introducing watermarks in NCS to detect attacks efficiently. Throughout the thesis, we provide various numerical examples to depict the efficacy of risk assessment and risk mitigation algorithms. We also provide numerous discussions and avenues for future research directions.
Sribalaji Coimbatore Anand
Doctoral Thesis, Uppsala University, (2024)
This thesis develops a framework for evaluating and improving the security of networked control systems in the face of cyber attacks. The considered security problem involves two strategic agents, namely a malicious adversary and a defender, pursuing their specific and conflicting goals. The defender aims to efficiently allocate defense resources with the purpose of detecting malicious activities. Meanwhile, the malicious adversary simultaneously conducts cyber attacks and remains stealthy to the defender. We tackle the security problem by proposing a game-theoretic framework and characterizing its main components the payoff function, the action space, and the available information for each agent. Especially, the payoff function is characterized based on the output-to-output gain security metric that fully explores the worst-case attack impact. Then, we investigate the properties of the game and how to efficiently compute its equilibrium. Given the combinatorial nature of the defender actions, one important challenge is to alleviate the computational burden. To overcome this challenge, the thesis contributes several system- and graph-theoretic conditions that enable the defender to shrink the action space, efficiently allocating the defense resources. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is validated through numerical examples.
Anh Tung Nguyen
Licentiate Thesis, Uppsala University, (2023)
This book presents an in-depth overview of recent work related to the safety, security, and privacy of cyber-physical systems (CPSs). It brings together contributions from leading researchers in networked control systems and closely related fields to discuss overarching aspects of safety, security, and privacy; characterization of attacks; and solutions to detecting and mitigating such attacks.
The book begins by providing an insightful taxonomy of problems, challenges and techniques related to safety, security, and privacy for CPSs. It then moves through a thorough discussion of various control-based solutions to these challenges, including cooperative fault-tolerant and resilient control and estimation, detection of attacks and security metrics, watermarking and encrypted control, privacy and a novel defense approach based on deception. The book concludes by discussing risk management and cyber-insurance challenges in CPSs, and by presenting the future outlook for this area of research as a whole.
Its wide-ranging collection of varied works in the emerging fields of security and privacy in networked control systems makes this book a benefit to both academic researchers and advanced practitioners interested in implementing diverse applications in the fields of IoT, cooperative autonomous vehicles and the smart cities of the future.
Riccardo M. G. Ferrari and André M. H. Teixeira (Eds)