Resides at Georgia Tech in the Schools of Cybersecurity and Privacy (SCP) and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), our research lab develops theory and tools to aid the construction of provably dependable and secure cyber-physical systems (CPS). In a typical CPS platform, distributed embedded computers monitor the physical processes and, at the same time, control them, usually with feedback loops in which physical processes affect computations and vice versa.
Specifically, our main focuses are
i) offline cyber-physical systems modeling and security/safety-aware verification: mathematical modeling of cyber-physical platforms using conventional control-theoretic and emerging data-driven AI techniques, and their theoretical security and safety analyses for formal hybrid verification including software modules (discrete sequential logic) and physical processes (continuous dynamics);
ii) online cyber-physical system security monitoring and attack detection: design of efficient solutions to monitor real-time execution of cyber and physical components via various modalities such as direct/indirect observations (e.g., software probes, physical sensors, and side-channel signals) and detect and locate malicious misbehaviors and accidental failures in cyber-physical platforms;
iii) real-time cyber-physical resilience and intrusion response: design of effective mathematical optimization, cyber-physical security metrics, and decision-making algorithms and modules to select best cyber and physical countermeasure strategies against misbehaviors to recover and restore the safe normal cyber-physical operation with minimal cost and in a timely manner.
Our research has been at the confluence of these areas, encompassing both theory and practice in various cyber-physical domains such as smart power grids, Internet-of-things, additive manufacturing, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), medical devices, and industrial control networks.
We have more than 15 active members and over 50 alumni. Our research has been funded by Federal agencies and industry partners, e.g., National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Office of Naval Research (ONR), Department of Energy (DOE), Advanced Research Projects Agency Energy (ARPA-E), Department of Education (DOE), Accenture Labs, Siemens, WinRiver, GrammaTech, Google, ETAP, and Fortinet.