June 27–29, 2017
The College Park Marriott Hotel and Conference Center
College Park, MD

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A Systems Engineering Approach to Cyber Physical Systems Security

John Chandy (john.chandy@uconn.edu)

Bio

Prof. John A. Chandy is a Professor and the Associate Head of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Connecticut. Prof. Chandy is also Co-Director of the Connecticut Cybersecurity Center, Interim Director of the UConn Center for Hardware Assurance, Security, and Engineering, and Co-Director of the Comcast Center for Cybersecurity Innovation. Prior to joining UConn, he had executive and engineering positions in software companies working particularly in the areas of clustered storage architectures, tools for the online delivery of psychotherapy and soft-skills training, distributed architectures, and unstructured data representation. His current research areas are in high-performance storage systems, reconfigurable computing, embedded systems security, distributed systems software and architectures, and multiple-valued logic. Dr. Chandy earned Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois in 1996 and 1993, respectively, and a S.B. in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989.

Abstract

In recent years, there is a growing awareness that cybersecurity issues are important not only in the Internet, but also in the context of energy, transportation, communications, healthcare, financial, and other infrastructure systems. Examples include industrial control systems, military platforms, aircraft, automobiles, medical instruments, grid meters and controls, and many other examples. These cyber-physical sytems underpin every part of our critical infrastructure and their security vulnerabilities at least as consequential as traditional software vulnerabilities. We face a number of research challenges in the design, protection, and resilience of cyber-physical systems. A particular challenge is formalizing the design and verification of these systems to provide evidence- and model-based assurances that the systems are safe, secure, and resilient. This entails a systems engineering process that includes analytics of risk, safety, security, and resilience, at multiple scales and phases of the system lifecycle from design to supply chain to operation. The presentation will highlight some of the areas of concern with respect to cyber-physical systems security and outline some potential strategies to fit a secure systems design process into a systems engineering workflow.