CAREER: Critical Infrastructure Resiliency through Robust Provenance and Information Sharing

Critical national infrastructures encompass a variety of cyber physical components to monitor and control complex operations that has direct impact to human lives and our society. In the efforts of modernizing the critical national infrastructures, advanced sensor and communication technologies are playing an important role in enhancing their operational efficiency and offering finer view on the human inaccessible physical processes.

However, this has potential to jeopardize the security of the operational technology and expand the cyber threat landscape, which opens opportunities of cyber exploitation to the underlying data, devices, and the physical processes. This project investigates how to devise an overhead aware provenance framework to incorporate implicit local resiliency in the critical infrastructure that assures data and operational trustworthiness while thwarting rogue devices through continuous lightweight authentications.

To further enhance the cyber resiliency of the critical infrastructure sector as a whole, this project also explores on designing distributed information sharing models that promotes reciprocity and reduces the risks of cyber exploitation. In addition to the research contributions, this project has a tightly integrated education plan which involves developing critical infrastructure security skill sets among next generation engineers, summer training for the middle and high school teachers to induce cybersecurity interests in their classrooms and disseminating new critical infrastructure security knowledge to regional and national stakeholders.

The outcomes of the project have significant value to the operators of the critical infrastructure sector to better understand and address the underlying cyber challenges in a timely and collaborative manner.

Achieving resilience in critical national infrastructures against emerging cyber threats poses a significant challenge as more and more network capable operational technology components are being deployed, making the operational environment complex, interdependent, and highly heterogeneous. This project particularly focuses on enhancing cyber resiliency of the operational technology through two major objectives: First, devise overhead aware provenance mechanisms that the critical infrastructure entities can adopt locally to have an implicit resiliency against diverse cyber attacks.

The provenance schemes ensure trustworthiness of the data generated from various physical processes in the operational technology environment, while accurately identifying the associated devices and assuring the integrity of state changes made by the physical processes. Second, develop community wide cyber resilience by designing distributed cyber information sharing mechanisms that allows disparate stakeholders to collaborate and effectively communicate their cyber knowledge for proactively defending the national cyber infrastructure.

With the interdisciplinary research components from computer science, cybersecurity, industrial and systems engineering, embedded systems, economics, and game theory, this project contributes to the understanding of the effectiveness of data and process provenance for cyber resiliency, the integration challenges of continuous lightweight authentication for device trustworthiness, the impact of cyber information sharing on overall risk posture of operational technology, and the factors contributing to induce reciprocity in information sharing.

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.