Engineering Commons^™

A Nonlinear Systems Framework For Cyberattack Prevention For Chemical Process Control Systems, Helen Durand

Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Faculty Research Publications

Recent cyberattacks against industrial control systems highlight the criticality of preventing future attacks from disrupting plants economically or, more critically, from impacting plant safety. This work develops a nonlinear systems framework for understanding cyberattack-resilience of process and control designs and indicates through an analysis of three control designs how control laws can be inspected for this property. A chemical process example illustrates that control approaches intended for cyberattack prevention which seem intuitive are not cyberattack-resilient unless they meet the requirements of a nonlinear systems description of this property.

Suas: Cybersecurity Threats, Vulnerabilities, And Exploits, Philip Craiger, Gary Kessler, William Rose

National Training Aircraft Symposium (NTAS)

The FAA predicts that purchases of hobbyist small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS) will grow from 1.9 million in 2016 to 4.3 million by 2020, and commercial sUAS to increase from 600,000 in 2016 to 2.7 million by 2020. sUAS, often referred to as 'drones,' are comprised of aeronautical hardware, a CPU, RAM, onboard storage, radio frequency communications, sensors, a camera, and a controller used by the pilot-in-command (PIC). Some have argued that a sUAS is essentially a flying computer. As such, sUAS are sometimes susceptible to many of the types of attacks that are often used on PC-based computers attached …

State Measurement Spoofing Prevention Through Model Predictive Control Design, Helen Durand

Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Faculty Research Publications

Security of chemical process control systems against cyberattacks is critical due to the potential for injuries and loss of life when chemical process systems fail. A potential means by which process control systems may be attacked is through the manipulation of the measurements received by the controller. One approach for addressing this is to design controllers that make manipulating the measurements received by the controller in any meaningful fashion very difficult, making the controllers a less attractive target for a cyberattack of this type. In this work, we develop a model predictive control (MPC) implementation strategy that incorporates Lyapunov-based stability …

Survey Results On Adults And Cybersecurity Education, Frank Breitinger, Joseph Ricci, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Cyberattacks and identity theft are common problems nowadays where researchers often say that humans are the weakest link in the security chain. Therefore, this survey focused on analyzing the interest for adults for ‘cyber threat education seminars’, e.g., how to project themselves and their loved ones. Specifically, we asked questions to understand a possible audience, willingness for paying / time commitment, or fields of interest as well as background and previous training experience. The survey was conducted in late 2016 and taken by 233 participants. The results show that many are worried about cyber threats and about their children exploring …

Low Latency Intrusion Detection In Smart Grids, Israel Zairi Akingeneye

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The transformation of traditional power grids into smart grids has seen more new technologies such as communication networks and smart meters (sensors) being integrated into the physical infrastructure of the power grids. However, these technologies pose new vulnerabilities to the cybersecurity of power grids as malicious attacks can be launched by adversaries to attack the smart meters and modify the measurement data collected by these meters. If not timely detected and removed, these attacks may lead to inaccurate system state estimation, which is critical to the system operators for control decisions such as economic dispatch and other related functions.

This …