May 6, 2016: Invited Speaker Seminar: Investigating CPS Security by Leveraging Real Cyber Threat Intelligence

Dr. Elias Bou-Harb
Assistant Professor, Florida Atlantic University (FAU)

Friday, May 6, 2016 at 3:00 pm
Room EV003.309

Abstract

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) embody a tight integration between network-based communications, software, sensors and physical processes. These systems are now being used to maximize the efficiency, reliability, and safety of society’s critical infrastructures. While the integration of cyber technologies within legacy industrial systems will most certainly introduce opportunities and advancements not envisioned yet, it will undoubtedly also pave the way to misdemeanors that will exploit systems’ resources causing drastic and severe nationwide impacts.

This talk takes a step back on how we approach CPS security and resiliency. While almost all literature works exclusively tackled the security of one independent aspect of such systems (i.e., cyber or physical), we argue that these systems cannot be decoupled. Indeed, our vision and ultimate goal is to attempt to merge or at least diminish the gap between highly theoretical solutions and practical approaches derived from insightful empirical experimentation, for securing CPS.

To this end, this talk presents exploratory and preliminary research intended to leverage real cyber threat intelligence and Internet measurements to investigate attackers’ intention and actual attacks targeting various CPS communication protocols. This talk will also put forward a federated architecture that aims at capturing tangible CPS attacks in addition to providing means to generate CPS resiliency strategies. We conclude this talk by providing some empirical findings and discussing few insightful design considerations.

Biography

Dr. Elias Bou-Harb is currently an Assistant Professor at the department of Computer Science at Florida Atlantic University (FAU). Previously, he was an NSERC visiting research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) under the sponsorship of Professor Bruno Sinopoli. He is also a permanent research scientist at the National Cyber Forensic and Training Alliance (NCFTA) of Canada. The latter is an international organization which focuses on the investigation of cyber-crimes impacting citizens and businesses. Dr. Bou-Harb holds a Ph.D. degree in computer science from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, which was executed under the supervision of Professors Mourad Debbabi and Chadi Assi. His research and development activities and interests focus on the broad area of operational cyber security, including, attacks detection and characterization, malware investigation, cyber security for critical infrastructure and big data analytics.