CSIS Seminar

Towards a Hardware/Software Co-Design Approach for CPS and IoT Security

Abstract

Have you ever wondered how simple music can leak deadly pathogens from a bio-safety lab? Have you ever considered how an industrial robotic arm can be compromised from a cloud infrastructure? Have you ever imagined an attacker could use a magnetic field to shut down a weak microgrid? If the above questions excite you, please attend my research seminar, where my research answers the above questions with a practical demonstration of CPS attacks on industry-used infrastructure. With this seminar, the audience will gain a deep insight into how hardware/software interaction in CPSs can open a “Pandora’s Box” of unknown threats that can come from very unconventional ways. My research sits at the intersection of hardware and software layers in CPSs and IoTs, exploring how interactions of cyber and physical components can affect the safety and controllability of closed-loop control from sensing to actuation. Most attacks on CPSs and IoTs can be propagated from the physical domain to the cyber domain or vice-versa and hence, can be termed as cross-domain attacks. To understand these cross-domain attacks, a very different set of methodologies and tools is needed. My research talks about how these tools can be made. Moreover, the seminar will show how cross-domain vulnerabilities can be handled using new hardware/software co-design approaches to detect, contain and isolate threats in CPSs and IoTs.

Speaker Bio

Anomadarshi Barua is a Ph.D. candidate studying Computer Engineering at the University of California Irvine. He received his M.S. degree in Embedded Computing Systems jointly at the University of Southampton (UoS) and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in 2016. Now, He is working under the supervision of Professor Al Faruque in the Autonomous and Intelligent Cyber-Physical Systems (AICPS) Lab. His current research focuses on the system-level design of embedded and Cyber-Physical-Systems (CPSs) with a special interest in CPS security, low-power design, and computer microarchitecture. He publishes in the security conferences like ACM CCS, USENIX, ACSAC, RAID, and CHES and system conferences, like ICCPS and ICCAD. He also has worked in several industries in North America and Europe, such as Intel Corporation (USA), Solidigm (USA), Nordic Semiconductor (Norway), and IDEAS (Norway). In his leisure time, he likes to travel to new places and go for hiking.