PRECISE Seminar: Security of Networked Systems with Application to Environmental Monitoring, Power Grids, and Building Energy Management

Technological advancements in low-power processors, sensors, and radios have boosted the development of single-chip sensor-actuator devices. When distributed over a wide area, networks of these embedded devices can revolutionize a variety of application domains, including environmental monitoring, health care, transportation, defense systems, mobile robotics, manufacturing, smart buildings, and citywide energy optimization.  These cyber-physical systems represent a new class of embedded systems where computation, communication, and control are intimately coupled and introduce new challenges for ensuring reliability, security and performance. Due to the complexity and inter-connected nature of such systems, engineered solutions having poor performance and unanticipated results can result in catastrophic failures and societal rejection.  As a first step in addressing the security issues of cyber physical systems, this talk will discuss fundamental mathematical tools for robustly detecting failures and attacks in dynamically networked systems.  The implementation and preliminary performance results of these mathematical tools will be discussed in the context of real-world application domains including environmental monitoring, power grids, and building energy management.