Events Calendar

EE 598 Cyber-Physical Systems Seminar Series

Speaker: Mohammad Al Faruque, Assistant Professor, University of California, Irvine

Talk Title: Cyber-Physical System Forensics for Cross-Domain Attack Analysis

Abstract: A Cyber-Physical System (CPS) is a cross-domain system integrating sub-systems from multiple domains connected through communication networks. Today, CPSs can be found in security-sensitive areas such as aerospace, automotive, energy, healthcare, manufacturing transportation, entertainment, and consumer appliances. Compared to the traditional information and embedded systems, due to the tight interactions between cyber and physical domains in CPSs, new vulnerabilities emerge from the boundary between cyber and physical domains. This enables new types of "cross-domain attacks" which include the following two concepts: First, observable energy flows from physical domain such as the analog emissions from acoustics, power flow, electromagnetic (EM), thermal, etc. provide the attackers new ways to access the critical information in the cyber domain. We call this types of attack as "Side Channel Attacks." Second, the classic cyber domain attacks on CPS may cause direct physical damage on them. The second types of attack in the scope of this talk will be called "Kinetic Cyber Attack." In the first part of this talk, I will be presenting our recent work on additive manufacturing systems (3D-printers), where we have demonstrated the vulnerability of a 3D-printer to confidentiality attacks. An additive manufacturing system is attacked through observable acoustic analog emissions in this work. See recent articles at Science (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6282/132) and at ACM Communications (http://cacm.acm.org/news/199406-bad-vibrations-uci-researchers-find-security-breach-in-3d-printing-process/fulltext) about our work.

In the second half of the talk, I will discuss the bright side of the tight integration between cyber and physical domains, which may bring about the potential of physics-centric defense mechanisms to shield CPS against attackers. I will present how my group has achieved physical-layer security for V2X communication for an automotive cyber-physical system.


Biography: Mohammad Al Faruque is currently with the University of California Irvine (UCI), where he is a tenure track assistant professor and directing the Cyber-Physical Systems Lab. Prof. Al Faruque served as an Emulex Career Development Chair during October 2012 till July 2015. Before, he was with Siemens Corporate Research and Technology in Princeton, NJ. His current research is focused on system-level design of embedded systems and Cyber-Physical-Systems (CPS) with special interest on model-based design of software-integrated (multi)-physics systems, multi-core systems, CPS security, etc.

Prof. Al Faruque received the 2016 DATE Best Paper Award, the 2015 DAC Best Paper Award, the 2009 ICCAD Best Paper Award, the 2016 NDSS Distinguished Poster Award, the 2008 HiPEAC Paper Award, the 2012 DATE Best IP Award Nomination, the 2005 DAC Best Paper Award Nomination, the EECS Professor of the year 2015-16 Award, the 2015 UCI Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Fostering Undergraduate Research, and the 2015 Hellman Fellow Award. Besides 50+ IEEE/ACM publications in the premier journals and conferences, Prof. Al Faruque holds 4 US patents.


Host: Paul Bogdan

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Estela Lopez