This article focuses on the research and development work at the Eclipse Research Cluster at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) to address cybersecurity challenges. The research team is seeking to address cybersecurity challenges by employing a diverse set of specialty areas including Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Electrical Engineering. This group is looking at leveraging physical relationships to provide a diversity of measurement and reporting to not only improve anomaly detection, but also make decisions about how to keep critical functions operating even if only in a degraded mode. By exploiting the physical relationships between pressing a brake pedal and the operator’s leg position and the power consumption of a sensor and the instructions being run in it, this group proposes to provide new indicators that can be used to increase resilience to cyberattacks. This concept describes an example for a small section of a typical vehicle system. This group’s future research is seeking to expand this general approach of using the physical relationships of sensors to the properties they are measuring or actuators and the cause or effect of their action.
Cyber-Physical Security Research at UMBC's Eclipse Lab
CDR Brien Croteau graduated in 1999 from the U.S. Naval Academy with a B.S. in Systems Engineering, completed a M.S. in Control Systems Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2000. He served as a Naval Flight Officer for 16 years flying in the EA-6B Prowler and EA-18G Growler aircraft and attended the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School in 2007. In 2016, he was selected to become a Permanent Military Professor and began a Ph.D. program in Electrical Engineering at University of Maryland Baltimore County. After completing that degree, he will join the Cyber Science department at the U.S. Naval Academy. His research interests are in the nexus between hardware security and higherlevel control systems applications.
Deepak Krishnankutty received the B.Tech. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Calicut, Kerala, India, in 2006, and the M.Tech. degree in Computer Science and Engineering (Information Security) from the National Institute of Technology Rourkela (NITR), Rourkela, India, in 2009. In 2013, he joined the Department of Computer Engineering, University of Maryland Baltimore County, as a Ph.D. student after a 3 year stint as a lecturer in Kerala, India. His research interest is in the area of hardware security and its countermeasures.
Croteau, C. B., and Krishnankutty, D. (March 1, 2017). "Cyber-Physical Security Research at UMBC's Eclipse Lab." ASME. Mechanical Engineering. March 2017; 139(03): S18–S23. https://doi.org/10.1115/1.2017-Mar-7
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