Severe Impact Resilience: Assessment Framework for Adaptive Compound Threats

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PI: Dr. Imes Chiu, Construction Engineering Research Lab - Eng Res. Dev. Center - USACE

SERDP Project RC20-1138

Team

• University of Pittsburgh
  • Dr. Amy Babay
  • Maher Khan
  • Huzaifah Nadeem
  • Benjamin Gilby
  • Derrick Hicks
• Johns Hopkins University
  • Dr. Yair Amir
  • Sahiti Bommareddy
• Colorado State University
  • Dr. John W. van de Lindt
• University of Cyprus
  • Dr. Mathaios Panteli
• George Mason University
  • Dr. Linton Wells II

Overview

This project investigates compound threats, in which cyberattacks are targeted to compound the damage inflicted by climatic hazards.

Increasingly frequent and severe natural hazards combined with more sophisticated malicious cyberattacks pose a serious threat to US critical infrastructure systems. However, compound threats that involve both natural hazards and cyberattacks that may exploit hazard conditions to cause further infrastructure damage or prolong recovery are not yet well understood.

The goals of our project are to develop frameworks to model the effects of these compound threats, and to design new system architectures that can better withstand this combination of natural disasters and malicious attacks.

Specifically, we aim to:

• Develop a realistic compound threat scenario relevant to US Indo-Pacific Command as a case study.
• Develop a framework to model resilience to compound threats in the context of the (generalizable) scenario.
• Develop architectures and recommendations for the design of critical infrastructure control systems that can improve resilience to compound threats.
• Validate the framework in a testbed environment.

Publications

• Tolerating Compound Threats in Critical Infrastructure Control Systems
  Sahiti Bommareddy, Maher Khan, Huzaifah Nadeem, Benjamin Gilby, Imes Chiu, John W. van de Lindt, Omar Nofal, Mathaios Panteli, Linton Wells II, Yair Amir, and Amy Babay
  IEEE International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS 2023)
  [PDF]

• A Resilience Assessment Framework for Coupled Power and Communication Infrastructure
  Mohamed Lotfi, Mathaios Panteli, Linton Wells II, Kathryn Blackmond Laskey, John W. van de Lindt, Yair Amir, Amy Babay, Imes Chiu
  IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting (PESGM 2023)
  [IEEEXplore]

• Real-Time Byzantine Resilient Power Grid Infrastructure: Evaluation and Trade-offs
  Sahiti Bommareddy, Maher Khan, David J Sebastian Cardenas, Carl Miller, Christopher Bonebrake, Yair Amir, and Amy Babay
  IEEE RTSS Workshop on Explainability of Real-Time Systems and their Analysis (ERSA 2022)
  [PDF]

• Data-Centric Analysis of Compound Threats to Critical Infrastructure Control Systems
  Sahiti Bommareddy, Benjamin Gilby, Maher Khan, Imes Chiu, Mathaios Panteli, John W. van de Lindt, Linton Wells II, Yair Amir, and Amy Babay
  IEEE/IFIP DSN Workshop on Data-Centric Dependability and Security (DCDS 2022)
  [PDF] [IEEEXplore]

Presentations

• Data-Centric Analysis of Compound Threats to Critical Infrastructure Control Systems
  IEEE/IFIP DSN Workshop on Data-Centric Dependability and Security (DCDS 2022)
  [Teaser Video - 1 min] [Full Video - 20 min]

• Severe Impact Resilience: Assessment Framework for Compound Threats
  SERDP/ESTCP Symposium 2021
  [Slides]

Demonstrations

• Demonstration of an intrusion-tolerant SCADA system (configuration “6”, with 6 replicas deployed in a single control center), under emulated compound threats: video

• Demonstration of a network-attack-resilient intrusion-tolerant SCADA system (configuration “6+6+6”, with 6 replicas deployed in each of two control centers and one data center), under emulated compound threats: video