Research Center for Supervision, Safety and Automatic Control

Cyber Sequrity

Health-Aware and Resilient control of Critical Infrastructures and Complex Systems (DPI2014-58104-R) 

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS)

The term cyber physical system was created by Helen Gill at the National Science Foundation, in order to indicate the presence of discrete processing and communication of information cyber together with the engineered system physical:

‘’Cyber-physical systems are technical devices equipped with specialized software and programs that carry out specific tasks in a larger physical environment. Applications for such embedded systems include modern telecommunications (smartphones), car manufacturing, managing power grids, medical technology, to mention but a few’’.

The integration of cyber and physical components increases the systems efficiency but at the same time makes them susceptible to possible threats, generating in this way concerns about possible cyber-attacks targeting them.

Cyber-attacks are generic and they can influence the physical processes through the feedback actuation, compromising measurements, actuators data integrity and readiness; on the other hand, they can affect many components in a coordinated way, and can be re-designed to target any other CPS.

Owing to this, there is a new concern about the security and resilience in many applications of CPS. There is a need to develop new approaches to handle cyber-attacks and how to make these systems resilient to possible disruptions. Within the context of the project HARCRICS (Health-Aware and Resilient control of Critical Infrastructures and Complex Systems, DPI2014-58104-R), the research group is working on the classification of the cyber-attacks that can affect the control systems physical dynamics, with the aim of analyzing and understanding them in order to develop new detection and isolation methods that can help in finding strategies that mitigate the effects of the attacks on the CPS.

 

The following works have been carried out:

  1. Detection of replay attacks in cyber-physical systems using a frequency-based signature. (Submitted to the Journal of The Franklin Institute – on review)

  2. Frequency-based detection of replay attacks: application to a multiple tank system. (Submitted to the 10th IFAC Symposium on Fault Detection, Supervision and Safety for Technical Processes, SAFEPROCESS 2018)

  3. A two-tank benchmark for detection and isolation of cyber attacks. (Submitted to the 10th IFAC Symposium on Fault Detection, Supervision and Safety for Technical Processes, SAFEPROCESS 2018)