IUCRC Phase I: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Center for Infrastructure Trustworthiness in Energy Systems (CITES)

The Center for Infrastructure Trustworthiness in Energy Systems (CITES), a new Phase I IUCRC, focuses on research issues in the critical area of cyber resilience and the trustworthiness of energy systems (e.g., electric grid generation, transmission, and distribution), which have an extensive dependence on cyber technology. Composed of three University sites (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Arkansas, and Florida International University), CITES seeks to advance research and technologies that addresses unmet and underserved industry needs to better secure energy systems.

In close partnership with its members (Offices of Emergency Medical Services, energy providers, national labs, and industry associations), CITES will help secure the national defense by developing research that leads to practical means of protecting energy systems against failure within and attacks upon their cyber infrastructures. The fundamental issues addressed by CITES concern cyber resilience in the context of the specialized requirements for these “operational technology” (OT) systems, issues which include the heterogeneity of OT equipment, and integration with much more widely used informational technology (IT) equipment.

The Center will focus on detecting and quickly responding to attacks on the cyber infrastructure, rapidly recovering from the impacts of successful attacks, decreasing the costs and risks of patching operational systems, and ensuring that communication between devices happens fast enough and with enough volume to support operations. CITES will also serve an important role in augmenting the nation’s workforce in OT-knowledgeable cyber-security professionals.

Research methodologies include system analysis, formal methods and other mathematics, and empirical evaluation of prototypes. CITES technical contributions include knowledge creation, knowledge transfer, and empirical proofs of concept that utilize University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)’s specialized OT system testbed. Energy providers benefit by observing the potential for increased resilience; Equipment manufacturers benefit from proven ideas, and other stakeholders benefit from increased knowledge.

CITES research at UIUC is organized around three thrusts. The first of these thrusts is understanding security - developing ways of understanding the security properties of a system, including analysis of organization and configurations, and of the data derived from the system. Research about security properties formalizes representations of systems and develops security proofs.

Research in data analysis makes the task of interpreting data manageable and provides insights and understanding of system behaviors. The second thrust - security at the edge - has a focus on vulnerabilities that exist where subsystems join. The team develops means of detecting both potential and actualized flaws.

The technology is tailored to the special security needs (e.g., cross-system authentication) that occur at the edge. The third thrust - useable security technologies - ensures that new security technologies do not increase the risk of the system failing and do not violate any of the system’s operating constraints.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.