skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: Risk Management Decision Making for Security and Trust in Hardware Supply Chains Hardware Supply Chain
Modern cyber-physical systems are enabled by electronic hardware and embedded systems. The security of these sub-components is a concern during the design and operational phases of cyber-physical system life cycles. Compromised electronics can result in mission-critical failures, unauthorized access, and other severe consequences. As systems become more complex and feature greater connectivity, system owners must make decisions regarding how to mitigate risks and ensure resilience and trust. This paper provides an overview of research efforts related to assessing and managing risks, resilience, and trust with an emphasis on electronic hardware and embedded systems. The research takes a decision-oriented perspective, drawing from the perspectives of scenario planning and portfolio analysis, and describes examples related to the risk-based prioritization of cyber assets in large-scale systems.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1916760
PAR ID:
10286335
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
CESUN 2020
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; (, ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation)
    null (Ed.)
    Our world today increasingly relies on the orchestration of digital and physical systems to ensure the successful operations of many complex and critical infrastructures. Simulation-based testbeds are useful tools for engineering those cyber-physical systems and evaluating their efficiency, security, and resilience. In this article, we present a cyber-physical system testing platform combining distributed physical computing and networking hardware and simulation models. A core component is the distributed virtual time system that enables the efficient synchronization of virtual clocks among distributed embedded Linux devices. Virtual clocks also enable high-fidelity experimentation by interrupting real and emulated cyber-physical applications to inject offline simulation data. We design and implement two modes of the distributed virtual time: periodic mode for scheduling repetitive events like sensor device measurements, and dynamic mode for on-demand interrupt-based synchronization. We also analyze the performance of both approaches to synchronization including overhead, accuracy, and error introduced from each approach. By interconnecting the embedded devices’ general purpose IO pins, they can coordinate and synchronize with low overhead, under 50 microseconds for eight processes across four embedded Linux devices. Finally, we demonstrate the usability of our testbed and the differences between both approaches in a power grid control application. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ; ; ; (, 2017 Resilience Week (RWS))
    Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) consist of embedded computers with sensing and actuation capability, and are integrated into and tightly coupled with a physical system. Because the physical and cyber components of the system are tightly coupled, cyber-security is important for ensuring the system functions properly and safely. However, the effects of a cyberattack on the whole system may be difficult to determine, analyze, and therefore detect and mitigate. This work presents a model based software development framework integrated with a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testbed for rapidly deploying CPS attack experiments. The framework provides the ability to emulate low level attacks and obtain platform specific performance measurements that are difficult to obtain in a traditional simulation environment. The framework improves the cybersecurity design process which can become more informed and customized to the production environment of a CPS. The developed framework is illustrated with a case study of a railway transportation system. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ; ; (, American Society of Mechanical Engineers)
    Abstract We report progress towards development of a cyber-physical trust anchor for additive manufacturing systems. The additive manufacturing commercial sector needs cyber-physical trust anchors to establish a secure supply chain, to detect counterfeiting and to ensure part provenance. However, the underlying technology of cyber-physical trust anchors requires optimization and spans several sectors ranging from mathematics, additive manufacturing, materials science, nondestructive evaluation, to cyber science. The fast and effective deployment of cyber-physical trust anchors requires an educational component. This project present a novel method for authenticating additively manufactured parts. Features are extracted using advanced X-ray imaging, transformed into unique identifiers, and bound with security features for cloud-based blockchain authentication. A plan for the low-cost and safe incorporation of cyber-physical trust anchor research in education is included. The anticipated outcome is an optimized trust anchor prototype and educational product suitable for interdisciplinary research and coursework to develop the workforce needed for cyber-secured physical supply chainsd. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; (, National Science Review)
    null (Ed.)
    Abstract Modern control systems are featured by their hierarchical structure composed of cyber, physical and human layers. The intricate dependencies among multiple layers and units of modern control systems require an integrated framework to address cross-layer design issues related to security and resilience challenges. To this end, game theory provides a bottom-up modeling paradigm to capture the strategic interactions among multiple components of the complex system and enables a holistic view to understand and design cyber-physical-human control systems. In this review, we first provide a multi-layer perspective toward increasingly complex and integrated control systems and then introduce several variants of dynamic games for modeling different layers of control systems. We present game-theoretic methods for understanding the fundamental tradeoffs of robustness, security and resilience and developing a cross-layer approach to enhance the system performance in various adversarial environments. This review also includes three quintessential research problems that represent three research directions where dynamic game approaches can bridge between multiple research areas and make significant contributions to the design of modern control systems. The paper is concluded with a discussion on emerging areas of research that crosscut dynamic games and control systems. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; (, IEEE International Conference on Decentralized Applications and Infrastructures (DAPPS))
    The growing number of applications in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) involving different types of robots while maintaining interoperability and trust is an ongoing challenge faced by traditional centralized systems. This paper presents what is, to the best of our knowledge, the first integration of the Robotic Operating System (ROS) with the Ethereum blockchain using physical robots. We implement a specialized smart contract framework called “Swarm Contracts” that rely on blockchain technology in real-world applications for robotic agents with human interaction to perform collaborative tasks while ensuring trust by motivating the agents with incentives using a token economy with a self-governing structure. The use of open-source technologies, including robot hardware platforms such as TurtleBot3, Universal Robot arm, and ROS, enables the ability to connect a wide range of robot types to the framework we propose. Going beyond simulations, we demonstrate the robustness of the proposed system in real-world conditions with actual hardware robots. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email