SCP Seminal Talk
Presented by the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy
Oct. 14, 2021 | 11 a.m. EDT

Rutgers University
Title: Trustworthy Cyber-Physical Critical Infrastructures via Physics-Aware and AI-Powered Security
Abstract: Critical cyber-physical infrastructures, such as the power grid, integrate networks of computational and physical processes to provide people across the globe with essential functionalities and services. Protecting these critical infrastructures’ security against adversarial parties is a vital necessity because the failure of these systems would have a debilitating impact on economic security, public health and safety. Our research aims at provision of real-world solutions to facilitate the secure and reliable operation of next-generation critical infrastructures. This requires interdisciplinary research efforts across adaptive systems and network security, cyber-physical systems, and trustworthy real-time detection and response mechanisms.
In this talk, I will focus on real past and potential future threats against critical infrastructures and embedded controllers, and discuss the challenges in design, implementation and analysis of security solutions to protect cyber-physical platforms. I will introduce novel classes of working systems that we have developed to overcome these challenges. In particular, I will present our solutions for security verification of cyber-physical controllers for safe power grid and avionics operations. I will review our results to protect additive manufacturing and 3D printer security to ensure structural integrity of the ultimate printed objects. Finally, I will briefly talk about our recent efforts in security monitoring of the controller side-channel signals for online attack detection purposes.
Bio: Saman Zonouz is an Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rutgers University. His research focuses on security and privacy research problems in cyber-physical systems including the attack detection and response capabilities using techniques from systems security, control theory and artificial intelligence. His research has been awarded by Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), NSF CAREER Award in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Significant Research in Cyber Security by the National Security Agency (NSA), and Faculty Fellowship Award by Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). He was invited to co-chair the NSF CPS PI Meeting as well as the NSF CPS Next Big Challenges Workshop in 2021. Saman has served as the chair and/or program committee member for several conferences (e.g., IEEE Security and Privacy, CCS, NDSS, DSN, and ICCPS). Saman obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011.
Website: https://www.ece.rutgers.edu/Zonouz
Hosted by: Wenke Lee, Professor, Executive Director of IISP, and John P. Imlay Jr. Chair in Software