System Aware Cybersecurity A Multi-Sentinel Scheme To Protect a Weapons Research Lab

The Goals of UVa’s Systems Aware Cybersecurity for Physical Systems Efforts:

We seek an added layer of security to protect the most critical physical system functions

We monitor for illogical system behavior and, upon detection, reconfigure to compensate

We build on cybersecurity, fault tolerant and automatic control technologies

We seek economy through monitoring and reconfiguring a highly secure Sentinel—typically with many more security features than the system being protected can economically employ

We address not only network-based attacks, but also insider and supply chain attacks

We implement reusable design patterns to enable more economical solution development

We use risk-based support tools involving perspectives of both defenders and attackers

(Source: Dr. Horowitz Presentation at DoD (Sept 18th, 2015))

For the Calendar year 2015, the UVa work (as defined by Part I, Section 4 of the RT-136/SERC Research Topic document) fell into four (4) main areas of research: 1) the development of multi-sentinel architectures, 2) the consideration of various Human Factors issues, 3) a demonstration of how CloudBased Sentinels (along with the resultant integrity monitoring) could be performed, and 4) an assessment of how Advanced System Modeling and Attack Tree Tools can be integrated into a cyber security assessment workflow. An additional RADAR topic was added later (Appendix 12)