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1. Provable Adversarial Safety in Cyber-Physical Systems

   https://doi.org/10.1109/EuroSP57164.2023.00062  

   Castellanos, John H. ; Maghenem, Mohamed ; Cárdenas, Alvaro A. ; Sanfelice, Ricardo G. ; Zhou, Jianying ( July 2023 , IEEE)

   Most proposals for securing control systems are heuristic in nature, and while they increase the protection of their target, the security guarantees they provide are unclear. This paper proposes a new way of modeling the security guarantees of a Cyber-Physical System (CPS) against arbitrary false command attacks. As our main case study, we use the most popular testbed for control systems security. We first propose a detailed formal model of this testbed and then show how the original configuration is vulnerable to a single-actuator attack. We then propose modifications to the control system and prove that our modified system is secure against arbitrary, single-actuator attacks. 

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2. Evaluating the effects of cyber-attacks on cyber physical systems using a hardware-in-the-loop simulation testbed

   https://doi.org/10.1109/RWEEK.2017.8088669  

   Potteiger, Bradley ; Emfinger, William ; Neema, Himanshu ; Koutosukos, Xenofon ; Tang, CheeYee ; Stouffer, Keith ( September 2017 , 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. 

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3. Integrated simulation testbed for security and resilience of CPS

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3167132.3167173  

   Neema, Himanshu ; Potteiger, Bradley ; Koutsoukos, Xenofon ; Karsai, Gabor ; Volgyesi, Peter ; Sztipanovits, Janos ( April 2018 , Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing)

   Owing1 to an immense growth of internet-connected and learning-enabled cyber-physical systems (CPSs) [1], several new types of attack vectors have emerged. Analyzing security and resilience of these complex CPSs is difficult as it requires evaluating many subsystems and factors in an integrated manner. Integrated simulation of physical systems and communication network can provide an underlying framework for creating a reusable and configurable testbed for such analyses. Using a model-based integration approach and the IEEE High-Level Architecture (HLA) [2] based distributed simulation software; we have created a testbed for integrated evaluation of large-scale CPS systems. Our tested supports web-based collaborative metamodeling and modeling of CPS system and experiments and a cloud computing environment for executing integrated networked co-simulations. A modular and extensible cyber-attack library enables validating the CPS under a variety of configurable cyber-attacks, such as DDoS and integrity attacks. Hardware-in-the-loop simulation is also supported along with several hardware attacks. Further, a scenario modeling language allows modeling of alternative paths (Courses of Actions) that enables validating CPS under different what-if scenarios as well as conducting cyber-gaming experiments. These capabilities make our testbed well suited for analyzing security and resilience of CPS. In addition, the web-based modeling and cloud-hosted execution infrastructure enables one to exercise the entire testbed using simply a web-browser, with integrated live experimental results display. 

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4. Protecting Cyber-Physical System Testbeds from Red-Teaming/Blue-Teaming Experiments Gone Awry

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21280-2_8  

   Talukder, M.R.H. ; Amin, M.A. ; Ray, I ( November 2022 , Information Security Practice and Experience. ISPEC 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science)

   Su, C. ; Gritzalis, D. ; Piuri, V. (Ed.)

   Many cyber-physical systems (CPS) are critical infrastructure. Security attacks on these critical systems can have catastrophic consequences, putting human lives at risk. Consequently, it is very important to pace CPS systems to red-teaming/blue teaming exercises to understand vulnerabilities and the progression/impact of cyber attacks on them. Since it is not always prudent to conduct such security exercises on live CPS, researchers use CPS testbeds to conduct security-related experiments. Often, such testbeds are very expensive. Since attack scripts used in red-teaming/blue-teaming exercises are, in the strictest sense of the term, malicious in nature, there is a need to protect the testbed itself from these attack experiments that have the potential to go awry. Moreover, when multiple experiments are conducted on the same testbed, there is a need to maintain isolation among these experiments so that no experiment can accidentally or maliciously affect/compromise others. In this work, we describe a novel security architecture and framework to ensure protection of security-related experiments on a CPS testbed and at the same time support secure communication services among simultaneously running experiments based on well-formulated access control policies. 

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5. Integrated instruction set randomization and control reconfiguration for securing cyber-physical systems

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3190619.3190636  

   Potteiger, Bradley ; Zhang, Zhenkai ; Koutsoukos, Xenofon ( April 2018 , HoTSoS '18 Proceedings of the 5th Annual Symposium and Bootcamp on Hot Topics in the Science of Security)

   Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) have been increasingly subject to cyber-attacks including code injection attacks. Zero day attacks further exasperate the threat landscape by requiring a shift to defense in depth approaches. With the tightly coupled nature of cyber components with the physical domain, these attacks have the potential to cause significant damage if safety-critical applications such as automobiles are compromised. Moving target defense techniques such as instruction set randomization (ISR) have been commonly proposed to address these types of attacks. However, under current implementations an attack can result in system crashing which is unacceptable in CPS. As such, CPS necessitate proper control reconfiguration mechanisms to prevent a loss of availability in system operation. This paper addresses the problem of maintaining system and security properties of a CPS under attack by integrating ISR, detection, and recovery capabilities that ensure safe, reliable, and predictable system operation. Specifically, we consider the problem of detecting code injection attacks and reconfiguring the controller in real-time. The developed framework is demonstrated with an autonomous vehicle case study. 

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