Security and Privacy in Cyber-Physical Systems

Vaibhav Katewa , Ph.D.
Post-Doctoral Scholar, Pasqualetti Lab
Department of Mechanical Engineering
University of California, Riverside

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are engineered systems resulting from a seamless integration between physical processes and cyber technologies such as communication networks and computational hardware. This tight integration exposes the CPS to a variety of attacks, both on  the  physical  and  cyber  components,  which  can  result  in  significant  performance degradation.  Further,  CPS  usually  consist  of  multiple  agents  that  collaborate  and  share information with each other, thus making them vulnerable to privacy breach and leakage of confidential data. This talk will focus on the need, design and analysis of security and privacy mechanisms in CPS.

In  the  first  part  of  the  talk,  we  will  present  a  security  problem  for  real-time  resource-constrained autonomous systems (for example, a UAV), which can reserve only limited computational  resources  and  time  for  security  and  control  purposes.  In  such  scenarios,  the control and security tasks usually compete with each other for limited resources and there exists a trade-off between security and control performance. We characterize the optimal trade-off and identify attack regimes in which the system should prefer control tasks over security tasks, and vice-versa.

The second part will focus on privacy in cooperative dynamical multi-agent CPS. We present a noise adding differentially private mechanism to preserve the privacy of agents’ state over time, and analyze the effect of the privacy mechanism on the system performance. Next, we show that a fundamental trade-off exists between privacy and cooperation level, and it is beneficial for the agents to reduce cooperation if they want to be more private.

Vaibhav Katewa is a postdoctoral scholar in the department of Mechanical Engineering at UCR since January 2017, where he is working with Dr. Fabio Pasqualetti. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from University of Notre Dame in 2012 and 2016, and his Bachelors degree from Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur in 2007, all in Electrical Engineering. His research interests include design and analysis of security and privacy methods for cyber-physical systems and complex networks, decentralized and sparse feedback control, and protocol design for networked control systems.