Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

We are surrounded by embedded computing devices, in our homes, offices and cars. As the world moves towards expanding connectivity, it is increasingly common for these devices to be connected to the Internet. This connectivity opens up tremendous opportunities to improve our quality of lives. For example, many homes already have devices such as smart meters and smart thermostats, which can obtain real--time information about both energy prices and weather forecasts from the Internet to ensure that the temperature settings are automatically set to their optimal values. Similarly, automation is being increasingly used from industrial manufacturing to accelerating chemical research and discovery in self-driving labs. Unfortunately, the connected nature of these cyber-physical systems (CPS) devices, i.e., which are collectively also referred to as Internet-of-Things (IoT), renders them vulnerable to both accidental faults and malicious attacks. Because we depend on these devices for our day--to--day activities, their failures can cripple our daily lives and, in some cases, lead to devastating consequences. An example is the failure of the Nest thermostat after a routine software upgrade. Another recent example is when a seemingly harmless chess playing robot broke the finger of its seven-year-old opponent. Even more importantly, these devices are often targeted by malicious attackers who want to wreak harm on society for financial gains or for personal ends. Recently, there have been numerous instances of security attacks on smart meters, modern cars, drones, and even on life--critical medical devices such as pacemakers and insulin pumps. Therefore, there is a compelling need to make all CPS devices, including those underlying our critical IoT infrastructure, resilient to both accidental faults and malicious attacks. Our goal is to set up a CPS research lab for developing and testing novel software foundations for improving the dependability and security offered by contemporary and next-generation connected CPS. This proposal is for purchasing equipment related to studying dependability properties that are integral to safety-critical CPS (e.g., real-time computing and fault tolerance) as well as security attack and defence mechanisms (e.g., intrusion detection, side channel mitigation, adversarial machine learning). The equipment will allow us to target three broad classes of CPS/IoT devices: (i) unmanned ground vehicles (rovers) and unmanned aerial vehicles (drones); (ii) self-driving and autonomous vehicles; (iii) industrial systems for smart manufacturing. We will leverage the equipment to devise novel techniques to ensure that these systems are protected from both accidental failures and malicious attacks. We will use the equipment to provide hands--on training to 20 HQP working on this project, over a period of 2--3 years.