Security Engineering for Resilient Networked Critical Infrastructure

Project Overview:

Project Period: 08/09/2017-07/31/2022

Amount: $1,198,627.00

Funding Agency: US Department of Homeland Security (DHS)

Project Title: Security Engineering for Resilient Networked Critical Infrastructure

Role: PI (Danda B Rawat)

The Security Engineering project integrates education and research that may result in practical security and resilience for the Internet of Things (IoT) and cyber-physical systems (CPS) that comprise network-connected critical infrastructure.

Embedded and cyber-physical systems are increasingly vulnerable to attack especially because of ubiquitous network access—the Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the proliferation of such systems. Device heterogeneity and emerging communication protocols make it difficult to understand the scope of an IoT application’s attack surface, much less secure it. This project explores the security of IoT devices through an IoT Security Testbed that will enable further research exploration in the area of IoT Security and resilience.

Key Personnel

1. Prof. Danda B. Rawat, PI

2. Mr. James McCoy, PhD Student

3. DeMarcus Edwards, MS/PhD Student

4. Mr. David Hill, Jr, MS Student

5. Ms. Katrina Rosemond, MS Student

6. 20 undergraduate students will have to be listed here.

Publications and Dissemination

• Danda B. Rawat, Ronald Doku and Moses Garuba, "Cybersecurity in Big Data Era: From Securing Big Data to Data-Driven Security," IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, Vol. x, No. x, pp: xx - xx, 2019, to appear. [PDF]

• B. Ghimire and Danda B. Rawat, "Recent Advances on Federated Learning for Cybersecurity and Cybersecurity for Federated Learning for Internet of Things," IEEE Internet of Things Journal, vol. x, no. x, pp. x - x, 2022

• B. Ghimire and Danda B. Rawat, "Secure, Privacy Preserving and Verifiable Federating Learning using Blockchain for Internet of Vehicles," IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine, Vol. x, no. x, pp. xx - xx, 2021. (Early Access available)

• Danda B. Rawat and Kayhan Zrar Ghafoor, "Smart Cities Cybersecurity and Privacy", Elsevier Press, ISBN: 9780128150320, November 2018.

• Danda B. Rawat, Vijay Chaudhary and Ronald Doku, "Blockchain: Emerging Applications and Use Cases," arXiv:1904.12247, 2019.

• Felix O Olowononi, Danda B. Rawat, Moses Garuba and Charles Kamhoua, "Security Engineering with Machine Learning for Adversarial Resiliency in Mobile Cyber Physical Systems," Proc. of the SPIE 2019 Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Multi-Domain Operations Applications, Baltimore, MD, USA, April 14 - 18, 2019.

• Vijay Chaudhary and Danda B. Rawat, "On the Machine Learning for Minimizing the Negative Influence in Mobile Cyber Physical Systems," Proc. of the SPIE 2019 Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Multi-Domain Operations Applications, Baltimore, MD, USA, April 14 - 18, 2019.

• Geremew Begna and Danda B. Rawat, "Security Analysis in Context-Aware Distributed Storage and Query Processing in Hybrid Cloud Framework," Proc. of the IEEE CCWC 2019, Las Vega, USA, January 7 - 9, 2019.

Educational Activities

• Graduate students are being trained in this project during their BS, MS and PhD programs at Howard University. They learned cutting-edge technologies related to networked critical infrastructure and security. Most importantly, students learn how to conduct scientific research (document and publish research results in peer-reviewed archival articles) by getting involved in algorithm design, system development, simulation and experiments.

  • The research results from this project have been integrated into a graduate course and undergraduate courses (CSCI 479/EECE 479/EECE 679 Cyberecurity for Networked CPS/IoT) at Howard University, which is generally offered in every spring semester.