INVITED SPEAKER SEMINAR - Towards Secure, Reliable, and Efficient Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS): Attacks and Defenses

Date: Thursday, March 13, 2025 from 9:00 a.m. 

Location: Online event

Abstract

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) such as mobile devices, Internet of Things (IoT), and autonomous vehicles are becoming ubiquitous in public and private spaces. While CPS integrate sensing, computation, control and networking into physical objects, the increasingly complex hardware and the lack of low-level data protection and privacy controls bring new security and privacy challenges resulting from side-channel information leakage and fundamental design flaws. Such side channels are challenging to prevent due to the undefined interactions between physical signals, sensor architectures, and wireless transmissions.

In this talk, I will systematically reveal the security and privacy in the key components of CPS in critical infrastructures by characterizing the causality, limits, and mitigations of contactless side channels through physics modelling and computation. Specifically, I will introduce a series of CPS security research using hardware-software co-design and cutting-edge AI techniques to investigate side-channel attacks against smartphone-embedded sensors, computation and control units in IoT devices, and metadata in wireless transmission, as well as propose effective defense methods. Beyond highlighting the academic and industrial impact of these studies, I will also demonstrate my future research vision of developing software-defined, model-safe and privacy-preserving mechanisms to protect emerging CPS platforms.

Biography

Dr. Tao Ni (Tony) is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Computer Science at the City University of Hong Kong, where he obtained his Ph.D. degree in June 2024. His research interests are in the field of cybersecurity, with a focus on cyber-physical systems (CPS) security, side-channel analysis, AI security and privacy, and wireless security. So far, Tony has published over 15 papers in top-tier cybersecurity and system conferences, including IEEE S&P, CCS, USENIX Security, NDSS, MobiCom, MobiSys, and MobiHoc, and his research has been widely acknowledged by industrial-leading companies. He won the Cybersecurity Best Practical Paper Award and was named an ACM MobiSys Rising Star in 2024.

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Meeting ID: 812 7291 1607
Passcode: 956133