Severe Impact Resilient Systems

This research is currently funded through the DoD SERDP program.

Overview

The joint threats of increasingly frequent and follow-on severe natural disasters and sophisticated malicious cyberattacks are becoming increasingly realistic and seriously threaten critical infrastructure systems. This novel threat model and the impact of such threats on critical infrastructure are not well understood. Successful intrusions (compromises) of the control servers can cause the system to behave in incorrect ways (exhibiting arbitrary/Byzantine behavior - like those due to cyber attacks), as opposed to simply becoming unavailable (non-malicious - like those due to natural disasters). Because of the differences between these two failure modes, the dependability reserach has traditionally considered them separately, developing crash-fault-tolerant system architectures and protocols to address non-malicious faults, and Byzantine-fault-tolerant protocols to address arbitrary or malicious faults. The research focuses on addressing the impact of novel compound threats on critical infrastructure by developing severe impact resilient control systems.

The goals of our research is to develop analysis framework to model the effects of these compound threats, and to design new system architectures and techniques that can better withstand this combination of natural disasters and malicious attacks.

Specifically, we aim to:

• Define the novel compound threat model.
• Develop analysis framework to model the impact of compound threats on critcial infrastructure like the power grid.
• Apply the analysis framework for the resiliency analysis of existing power grid infrastructure
• Develop architectures, techniques and recommendations for the design of critical infrastructure control systems that can improve resilience to compound threats.
• Validate and demonstrate the proposed severe impact resilient systems in test bed deployments.
• Analyse the impact of compound threat of a critical infrastructure on other infrastrutures.