Systems and Control Methods for Cyberphysical Security

Logistic

THE COURSE WILL START IN THE SECOND SEMESTER, AROUND THE END OF FEBRUARY 2025.

Lectures: Date and place to be announced.

Office hours: Thursdady, at 10:00-12:00 in room A213, DIAG department, or online (Google Meet link). Please send me an email in advance.

Contact: liberati@diag.uniroma1.it. Write me for any question.

Google Class: A Google class will be setup and used mainly for communications.

Description: The goal of the course it to provide an in-depth introduction to cyber-physical systems modelling, analysis, and protection against cyber-physical attacks. The course starts with an overview of practical examples of cyber-physical systems, and the study of known recent cyber-physical attacks, to familiarize with the important concepts. The key concepts and standards in risk management are presented, as risk management is the correct tool to systematically organize and manage all the activities related with cyber-physical security of a system. The practical concepts introduced are then abstracted and formalized by relying on mathematical tools from system theory. This allows to model a cyber-physical system, the attack, and the perturbation that the attack causes in the system. Then, conditions are developed to check whether it is possible or not to attack a system in an undetectable way. The most common and important types of attacks are then modelled and analysed (bias injection attacks, replay attacks, false data injection attacks, switching attacks, zero dynamics attacks, covert attacks, atc.). Finally, methods are presented to build attack detectors, and to optimally protect a system againts attacks. During the entire course, most of the concepts introduced will be  demonstrated through simulations (of attacks and detectors/defence schemes) in Matlab and Julia.

New: In this latest edition of the course we will also cover new topics such as encrypted control and control allocation. Also, the initial recap of basic concepts from systems theory will be streamlined, to make it more agile compared to the previous years.

Prerequisites: Fundamentals of mathematical analysis (derivatives, integrals, differential equations), geometry (linear systems, matrices, determinant, rank), physics (elementary physical systems: circuits, mechanical systems, etc.). These propaedeutic concepts will be recalled where useful during the course, so to make the course accessible for everyone.

Study materials: For every topic of the course, specific book sections and papers to study will be provided. The lecture slides and the blackboard notes will be available in the shared folder. Slides and recordings are password-protected. The study materials related to each lesson is specified in one of the last slides in the lecture slides. The zoom recordings of the lessons will be available . New: In this latest edition of the course, a book written by me will be available for free.

You can also take advantage of the slides, notes and zoom recordings of the previous version of the course, see website at this link.

Program

(Subject to minor variations before the course starts)

- Introduction to cyber-physical systems. What is a cyber-physical system. Examples from the critical infrastructures domain. Overview of known past and recent cyber-physical attaks to power systems and other critical infrastructures. Goal of the attackers and goal of the defender. Introduction to the protection of cyber-physical systems. Introduction to risk management and to a quantitative risk-based approach for securing cyber-physcal systems. Overview of main risk management standards and regulations;

- Modelling of cyber-physical systems, Part I: Recap of basic notions from automatic control and system theory (state space model, descriptor models, transfer functions, stability, controllability and observability);

- Modelling of cyber-physical systems, Part II: Modelling of an attack (the attack space, model knowledge, disclosure resources, disruption resources). First general detectability and identifiability conditions. Introduction to the design of attack detectors. False positives, false negatives, and the role of the consistency property of detectors;

- Modelling and analysis of the main cyber-physical attack types, from static to more complex dynamic ones: false data injection attacks (FDIAs) against state estimation, denial of service attacks, replay attacks, switching attacks, covert attacks, zero dynamics attacks, etc.;

- More on detection and mitigation techniques: Detectability of cyber-physical attacks in presence of side initial state information. Detectors and observers. Watermarking. Secure control allocation. Encrypted control. Resilient control.

- Applications from the smart grids domain: during the course, many of the theoretical concepts will be implemented through simulations in Matlab and Julia, presenting design and simulations of attacks and detection/decence strategies.

Exams and Grading

Written exam (exercises and open-ended questions) plus optional oral exam. Typically, the written test lasts 2 to 3 hours, and includes one or two exercises, and one or two open-ended questions. No materials (notes, books, etc.) may be consulted. Students may ask for an additional oral exam after the written exam;

Exam dates to be announced. The student must book the exam on infostud.

Lecture Summaries and Study Materials


Detailed list of lessons' summary to appear. See last year's website to have an idea of the topics discussed.

Past Exams