Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) face a pervasive threat of
attack, especially those that play critical roles in automating
public infrastructure such as water and power. This threat has
motivated research into a wide variety of countermeasures
to ensure their defence. In this talk, we focus on one such
method that aims at the detection of attacks that compromise
one or more actuators and sensors in a plant either through
successful intrusion in the plant’s communication network or
directly through the plant computers.

The method, labelled as
Distributed Attack Detection (DAD), detects attacks in realtime
by identifying anomalies in the behavior of the physical
process in the plant. Anomalies are identified by using monitors
that are implementations of invariants derived from the plant
design. Each invariant must hold either throughout the plant
operation, or when the plant is in each state. The effectiveness
of DAD was assessed experimentally on an operational
water treatment plant named SWaT that is a near-replica of
commercially available large treatment plants. We will also
explore other ongoing works in cyber physical systems security.

BIOGRAPHY:
Sridhar Adepu is a PhD candidate in Information Systems
Technology and Design (ISTD) at Singapore University of
Technology and Design (SUTD). Prior to joining SUTD, he
worked as a lecturer in computer science and engineering
(CSE) at Vignan University, India for 1.5 years. He holds a
master’s degree in CSE from National Institute of Technology
Rourkela, India. Sridhar’s work focuses on security of cyber
physical systems. His work is recognised in different places:
1) Gold medal from the 10 ASEAN countries, 2018. 2) Best
paper award at HASE workshop 2017. 3) Best student paper
award at HASE conference 2017. 4) CIPRNET Young CRITIS
award 2016. At present, he is a visiting PhD student in
Institute for Software Research at CMU for six months.