Technical Report
System Aware Cybersecurity A Multi-Sentinel Scheme To Protect a Weapons Research Lab
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Trusted Systems
Report Number: SERC-2015-TR-110
Publication Date: 2015-12-07
Project:
Security Engineering – Design Patterns and Operational Concepts
Principal Investigators:
Dr. Barry Horowitz
Co-Principal Investigators:
Dr. Peter Beling
Dr. Marty Humphrey
LtCol Chris Gay
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)