Verification of information flow security in cyber-physical systems

"With a growing number of real-world applications that are dependent on computation, securing the information space has become a challenge. The security of information in such applications is often jeopardized by software and hardware failures, intervention of human subjects such as attackers, incorrect design specification and implementation, other social and natural causes. Since these applications are very diverse, often cutting across disciplines a generic approach to detect and mitigate these issues is missing. This dissertation addresses the fundamental problem of verifying information security in a class of real world applications of computation, the Cyber-physical systems (CPSs). One of the motivations for this work is the lack of a unified theory to specify and verify the complex interactions among various cyber and physical processes within a CPS. Security of a system is fundamentally characterized by the way information flows within the system. Information flow within a CPS is dependent on the physical response of the system and associated cyber control. While formal techniques of verifying cyber security exist, they are not directly applicable to CPSs due to their inherent complexity and diversity. This Ph.D. research primarily focuses on developing a uniform framework using formal tools of process algebras to verify security properties in CPSs. The merits in adopting such an approach for CPS analyses are three fold- i) the physical and continuous aspects and the complex CPS interactions can be modeled in a unified way, and ii) the problem of verifying security properties can be reduced to the problem of establishing suitable equivalences among the processes, and iii) adversarial behavior and security properties can be developed using the features like compositionality and process equivalence offered by the process algebras"--Abstract, page iii.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph. D. in Computer Science

Grantor

Missouri University of Science and Technology

Year dc:date.available

2016

Author dc:creator

• Akella, Rav

• Computer Sciences

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/doctoral_dissertations/2030

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarsmine.mst.edu:doctoral_dissertations-3032