Designing State Estimators for Safety-Critical Aerospace Positioning, Navigation and Timing Systems

The integration of digital connectivity with physical processes in IoT environments has enabled sensors and actuators to interact with each other over the physical space. However, IoT environments have complex physical interactions between actuators and sensors that create new classes of vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, traditional IoT security measures ignore such complex physical interactions and fail to achieve sufficient breadth and fidelity to uncover these vulnerabilities, causing poor accuracy and false alarms.

This talk will discuss our efforts in safety and security reasoning in IoT deployments through physical modeling and formal analysis. Demoz will introduce the approach to discovering physical interaction vulnerabilities in IoT deployments. This approach builds the joint physical behavior of interacting IoT apps through code and dynamic analysis. It next validates a set of new metric temporal logic policies through falsification. Second, Demoz will demonstrate how attackers can evade existing IoT defenses by exploiting complex physical relations between actuators and sensors. Demoz will next introduce software patching and sensor placement to make the existing defenses robust against evasion attacks. Through these efforts, his team create holistic physical models toward achieving the compositional safety and security of an IoT system.

Speaker: Demoz Gebre-Egziabher, University of Minnesota

Attend in person or online here.