Other Research Areas
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Resilient Cyber Physical Systems
A cyber physical system (CPS) is defined as a system involving the close integration of the system’s cyber (computational and communications) and physical components. Ideally, the tight coordination of the cyber and physical elements enables greater autonomy, efficiency, functionality, reliability, adaptability and usability. CPSs are typically considered to be “next generation” systems that will evolve from current generation embedded systems, sensor networks, robotics, energy systems and medical technology among other application spaces.
The Need for Security
The security of these systems must be addressed for a number of reasons. First, many envisioned CPSs will be used for critical decision-making and will affect human and societal welfare at different scales making it imperative that these systems be trustworthy, robust and reliable. For example, the emerging smart grid is a CPS involving bidirectional energy and information flow. The security and resilience of this critical infrastructure is of paramount importance. Similarly, technologies for robotic surgery must be trustworthy given their crucial application to healthcare and human welfare. Second, the tight coupling of cyber-physical components results in a highly information technology-intertwined system which is vulnerable to cyber attack on many scales. These attacks may be commonly known or even readily available online. Thus, CPSs provide greater opportunities for malicious opponents. Third, many CPS application areas such as the field of electric power systems are governed with cyber security guidelines and standards. For example, new “smart” technologies integrated by electric power utilities (EPUs) must be security-compliant. Thus, to be able to gain market share, vendors of secure CPS technologies must account for security in their subsystems design and development.
Vision
Secure cyber physical systems are envisioned to 1) provide robust control and communications, 2) be self- and situationally-aware in real-time, 3) provide continuous (but possibly limited) service under persistent attacks and failures, and 4) work cooperatively with shared defenses and understanding. Such functionality enables a cyber physical system to operate with the purpose for which it was procured even in the presence of malicious parties and/or adversarial efforts. This requires multidisciplinary support for security solutions that are autonomous, cooperative, efficient, reconfigurable, resilient, robust and scalable. And thus a deep understanding of the cyber interactions and infrastructure physics on a common semantic basis is needed to understand information flow and physical dependencies detrimental to operation.
The current generation of CPS-like systems demonstrates a large degree of decoupling. Cyber and physical elements are distinct and approaches to securing these systems are not holistic. This creates a separation within the various system and system protection technologies. One of the main goals our research is to enable the tighter coupling between the cyber and physical entities while addressing issues of security and trust during system inception, design, development and even deployment. This requires first understanding the cyber-physical interactions within a common language that enables the exploration of system vulnerabilities and approaches to robustness.
Research Focus
Our research focuses on the development of CPS modeling frameworks in order to understand elements of secure (and insecure) system topologies. Our recent focus has been on the modeling of smart grid systems. In one thrust, we have identified a class of cyber-physical switching attacks via variable-structure system theory. Here, we demonstrate how an attacker can cyber-corrupt breaker control signals to destabilize a target power system component such as a synchronous generator using local state information about the power system. The work enables a better understanding of how to design smart grid topologies intrinsically robust to this form of reconfiguration attack. In another thrust, we develop a flocking-theory inspired paradigm to describe smart grid cyber-physical interactions. Such a biologically-inspired framework enables the convenient description of (discrete) cyber and (analog) physical couplings. Through this paradigm, we demonstrate active control approaches using distributed generators and storage to re-stabilize a smart grid system under various forms of cyber and physical attack.
Related Course Resources
Cyber-Physical Security of the Smart Grid
Related Publications
On the Use of Safety Critical Control for Cyber-Physical Security in the Smart Grid Inproceedings Proc. IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting, 2023. |
Mitigation of Cyber-attacks on Wide-Area Under-Frequency Load-Shedding Schemes Journal Article IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, 14 (3), pp. 2377-2389, 2023. |
Online Fault Classification in Connected Autonomous Vehicles using Output-Only Measurements Journal Article Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing, 190 , pp. 1-15, 2023. |
Revealing Vulnerability of N-1 Secure Power Systems to Coordinated Cyber-Physical Attacks Journal Article IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, 38 (2), pp. 1044-1057, 2023. |
Resilience Enhancement of Pilot Protection in Power Systems Journal Article IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery, 37 (6), pp. accepted, 2022. |
Hybrid Approach for Stabilizing Large Time Delays in Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control with Reduced Performance Penalties Inproceedings Proc. IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Kyoto, Japan, 2022. |
Dynamic-Line-Rating-Based Robust Corrective Dispatch against Load Redistribution Attacks with Unknown Objectives Journal Article IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 9 (18), pp. 17756-17766, 2022. |
Identification of a Class of Precision Motion Systems with Uncertain Hysteretic Nonlinearities Journal Article International Journal of Control, pp. 1-18, 2022. |
Transmissibility-based Health Monitoring of the Future Connected Autonomous Vehicles Networks Journal Article IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 71 (4), pp. 3633-3647, 2022. |
Electromagnetic Transients Based Detection of Data Manipulation Attacks in Three Phase Radial Distribution Networks Journal Article IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications, 58 (10:S197), pp. 667-677, 2022. |
Vulnerability of Connected Autonomous Vehicles Networks to Periodic Time-Varying Communication Delays of Certain Frequency Inproceedings Proc. IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2021. |
False Data Injection Attacks Against Synchronization Systems in Microgrids Journal Article IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, 12 (5), pp. 4471-4483, 2021. |
Health Monitoring of Mixed Autonomous and Human-driven Vehicle Platoon using Transmissibility Identification Inproceedings Proc. American Control Conference, 2021. |
Output Only Fault Detection and Mitigation of Networks of Autonomous Vehicles Inproceedings Proc. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2020. |
Fault Detection, Localization, and Mitigation of a Network of Connected Autonomous Vehicles Using Transmissibility Identification Inproceedings Proc. American Control Conference, 2020. |
Cybersecurity Enhancement of Transformer Differential Protection using Machine Learning Inproceedings Proc. Power & Energy Society Annual General Meeting, 2020. |
Cyber-Physical Attacks Targeting Communication Assisted Protection Schemes Journal Article IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, 35 (1), pp. 440-450, 2020. |
Preventing False Tripping Cyberattacks Against Distince Relays: A Deep Learning Approach Inproceedings Proc. SmartGridComm, Beijing, China, 2019. |
Mitigating Attacks with Nonlinear Dynamics on Actuators in Cyber-Physical Mechatronic Systems Journal Article IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 15 (9), pp. 4845-4856, 2019. |
On Cyber-Physical Coupling and Distributed Control in Smart Grids Journal Article IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 15 (8), pp. 4418-4429, 2019. |
Identification of Hammerstein Systems with Rate-Dependent Hysteresis Nonlinearities in a Class of Smart Material-Based Actuators Inproceedings Proc. American Control Conference, 2019. |
Intelligent Signal Processing and Coordination for the Adaptive Smart Grid Journal Article IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 36 (3), pp. 82-102, 2019. |
Modeling and Simulation of the Aurora Attack on Microgrid Point of Common Coupling Inproceedings Proc. 7th Workshop on Modeling and Simulation of Cyber-Physical Energy Systems at CPSWeek, pp. to appear, 2019. |
A Hierarchical Framework for Optimal Power Flow Management in the Smart Power Grid Journal Article IEEE Transactions on Signal and Information Processing over Networks, 5 (1), pp. 86-99, 2019. |
Flocking-Based Adaptive Granular Control Strategy for Autonomous Microgrids in Emergency Situations Journal Article IET Cyber-Physical Systems: Theory & Applications, 4 (2), pp. 108-119, 2019. |
On Effective Virtual Inertia of Storage-Based Distributed Control for Transient Stability Journal Article IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, 10 (1), pp. 327-336, 2019. |
A Class of Switching Exploits Based on Inter-Area Oscillations Journal Article IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, 9 (5), pp. 4659-4668, 2018. |
Storage-Based Multi-Agent Regulation Framework for Smart Grid Resilience Journal Article IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 14 (9), pp. 3859-3869, 2018. |
Reactance Perturbation for Detecting and Identifying FDI Attacks in Power System State Estimation Journal Article IEEE Journal on Selected Topics in Signal Processing, 12 (4), pp. 763-776, 2018. |
Identification of Precision Motion Systems with Prandtl-Ishlinskii Hysteresis Nonlinearities Inproceedings Proc. American Control Conference, pp. to appear, 2018. |
A Cyber-Physical Control Framework for Transient Stability in Smart Grids Journal Article IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, 9 (2), pp. 1205-1215, 2018. |
A Distributed Control Paradigm for Smart Grid to Address Attacks on Data Integrity and Availability Journal Article IEEE Transactions on Signal and Information Processing over Networks Special Issue on Distributed Signal Processing for Security and Privacy in Networked Cyber-Physical Systems, 4 (1), pp. 70-81, 2018. |
Reactance Perturbation for Enhancing Detection of FDI Attacks in Power System State Estimation Inproceedings Proc. IEEE GlobalSIP Symposium on Control & Information Theoretic Approaches to Privacy and Security, Montreal, Canada, 2017. |
On the Impact of Cyber Attacks on Data Integrity in Storage-Based Transient Stability Control Journal Article IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 13 (6), pp. 3322-3333, 2017. |
Resilient Distributed Real-Time Demand Response via Population Games Journal Article IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, 8 (6), pp. 2532-2543, 2017. |
On the Use of Energy Storage Systems and Linear Feedback Optimal Control for Transient Stability Journal Article IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 13 (4), pp. 1575 - 1585, 2017. |
A DER Attack-Mitigation Differential Game for Smart Grid Security Analysis Journal Article IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, 7 (3), pp. 1476-1485, 2017. |
Real-Time Integration of Intermittent Generation with Voltage Rise Considerations Journal Article IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy, 8 (3), pp. 938-952, 2017. |
A Game Theoretic Approach to Real-Time Robust Distributed Generation Dispatch Journal Article IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 13 (3), pp. 1006-1016, 2017. |
Impact of Cyber Attacks on Data Integrity in Transient Stability Control Inproceedings Proc. 2nd Workshop on Cyber-Physical Security and Resilience in Smart Grids at CPSWeek 2017, Pittsburgh, PA, 2017. |
Performance Metrics for Storage-Based Transient Stability Control Inproceedings Proc. 2nd Workshop on Cyber-Physical Security and Resilience in Smart Grids at CPSWeek 2017, Pittsburgh, PA, 2017. |
Toward a Practical Storage-Based Control Scheme for Transient Stability Applications Inproceedings Proc. Workshop on Modeling and Simulation of Cyber-Physical Energy Systems at CPSWeek 2017, Pittsburgh, PA, 2017. |
Implementation of an Offline Co-Simulation Test-bed for Cyber Security and Control Verification Inproceedings Proc. IEEE GLOBECOM Workshop on Cyber-Physical Smart Grid Security and Resilience, Pittsburgh, PA, 2016. |
A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Cyber Switching Attacks and Mitigation in Smart Grid Systems Journal Article IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, 7 (4), pp. 1846-1855, 2016. |
A Cyber-Enabled Stabilizing Control Scheme for Resilient Smart Grid Systems Journal Article IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, 7 (4), pp. 1856-1865, 2016. |
Investigating the Impact of Intrusion Detection System Performance on Communication Latency and Power System Stability Inproceedings Proc. ACM e-Energy Workshop on Communications, Computation and Control for Resilient Smart Energy Systems, Waterloo, Ontario, 2016. |
Enhancing the Performance of Controlled Distributed Energy Resources in Noisy Communication Environments Inproceedings Proc. IEEE Canadian Conference on Electrical & Computer Engineering, Vancouver, British Columbia, 2016. |
Control Verification via Off-Line Co-Simulation Inproceedings Proc. IEEE Canadian Conference on Electrical & Computer Engineering, Vancouver, British Columbia, 2016. |
Tuning Out of Phase: Resonance Attacks Inproceedings Proc. IEEE SmartGridComm, Miami, FL, 2015. |
A Systematic Approach to Delay-Adaptive Control Design for Smart Grids Inproceedings Proc. IEEE SmartGridComm, Miami, FL, 2015. |