Building Attack Resilience into Complex Networks: Deterrence, Inspection, and Recovery

Abstract

Resilience of critical infrastructure systems is a key requirement for defense. These systems work continuously to enable the essential services such as transportation, water, gas, and electricity. They utilize diverse components organized as physical networks, and operated through heterogeneous and connected cyber elements. Recent incidents have demonstrated that malicious entities can disrupt or gain control of these systems by exploiting cyber insecurities or physical faults, or their combination. We need a foundational theory to enable the integration of methods in analysis of large scale complex networks with methods in strategic security planning and operational response design, so that our infrastructure systems can better withstand, recover from, and adapt to contingencies resulting from both faults (reliability failures) and attacks (security failures). This project designs game theoretic strategies and network optimization algorithms for improving the resilience of large scale cyber physical infrastructure networks facing threats of correlated disruptions. Particularly, we focus on the following problems: i. Modeling the dynamic propagation of disturbances in cyber physical networks, with emphasis on congurations that are prone to network congestion and cascading failures; ii. Security strategies for heterogeneous network components to deter strategic adversaries who can simultaneously target and compromise the functionality of multiple components; iii. Optimal network inspection strategies that provide detection guarantees for both security failures and reliability failures; and iv. Recovery operations involving coordination between multiple entities, given their individual objectives and imperfect information about the location and type of failures.

Document Details

Document Type
DoD Grant Award
Publication Date
Jan 14, 2022
Source ID
FA95501910263

Entities

People

  • Patrick Jaillet

Organizations

  • Air Force Office of Scientific Research
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • United States Air Force

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Cybersecurity.
  • Distributed Systems and Data Platform Development

Technology Areas

  • Cyber