628 research outputs found
Formal Approaches to Control System Security From Static Analysis to Runtime Enforcement
With the advent of Industry 4.0, industrial facilities and critical infrastructures are transforming into an ecosystem of heterogeneous physical and cyber components, such as programmable logic controllers, increasingly interconnected and therefore exposed to cyber-physical attacks, i.e., security breaches in cyberspace that may adversely affect the physical processes underlying industrial control systems. The main contributions of this thesis follow two research strands that address the security concerns of industrial control systems via formal methodologies. As our first contribution, we propose a formal approach based on model checking and statistical model checking, within the MODEST TOOLSET, to analyse the impact of attacks targeting nontrivial control systems equipped with an intrusion detection system (IDS) capable of detecting and mitigating attacks. Our goal is to evaluate the impact of cyber-physical attacks, i.e., attacks targeting sensors and/or actuators of the system with potential consequences on the safety of the inner physical process. Our security analysis estimates both the physical impact of the attacks and the performance of the IDS. As our second contribution, we propose a formal approach based on runtime enforcement to ensure specification compliance in networks of controllers, possibly compromised by colluding malware that may tamper with actuator commands, sensor readings, and inter-controller communications. Our approach relies on an ad-hoc sub-class of Ligatti et al.’s edit automata to enforce controllers represented in Hennessy and Regan’s Timed Process Language. We define a synthesis algorithm that, given an alphabet P of observable actions and a timed correctness property e, returns a monitor that enforces the property e during the execution of any (potentially corrupted) controller with alphabet P, and complying with the property e. Our monitors correct and suppress incorrect actions coming from corrupted controllers and emit actions in full autonomy when the controller under scrutiny is not able to do so in a correct manner. Besides classical requirements, such as transparency and soundness, the proposed enforcement enjoys deadlock- and diverge-freedom of monitored controllers, together with compositionality when dealing with networks of controllers. Finally, we test the proposed enforcement mechanism on a non-trivial case study, taken from the context of industrial water treatment systems, in which the controllers are injected with different malware with different malicious goals
Asimovian Adaptive Agents
The goal of this research is to develop agents that are adaptive and
predictable and timely. At first blush, these three requirements seem
contradictory. For example, adaptation risks introducing undesirable side
effects, thereby making agents' behavior less predictable. Furthermore,
although formal verification can assist in ensuring behavioral predictability,
it is known to be time-consuming. Our solution to the challenge of satisfying
all three requirements is the following. Agents have finite-state automaton
plans, which are adapted online via evolutionary learning (perturbation)
operators. To ensure that critical behavioral constraints are always satisfied,
agents' plans are first formally verified. They are then reverified after every
adaptation. If reverification concludes that constraints are violated, the
plans are repaired. The main objective of this paper is to improve the
efficiency of reverification after learning, so that agents have a sufficiently
rapid response time. We present two solutions: positive results that certain
learning operators are a priori guaranteed to preserve useful classes of
behavioral assurance constraints (which implies that no reverification is
needed for these operators), and efficient incremental reverification
algorithms for those learning operators that have negative a priori results
Systems engineering languages for modeling and analyzing supervisory control structures in cyber-physical systems
In today’s world, a new generation of high-tech cyber-physical systems are becoming an integral
part of our societies and their impact is only going to increase within the next years. Because of
their importance, the companies that develop these systems use proper systems engineering modeling
tools to help with the design and development of these types of systems and to accelerate the whole
development process.
In this thesis, 4 very popular modeling tools/languages are being tested and evaluated in terms of
their capabilities for model-based systems engineering. These tools are Simulink&Stateflow from
MATLAB, Modelica, MechatronicUML and SysML. In order to do that, a proper introduction of the
systems engineering process is presented to set the criteria in which the different tools/lan-
guages will be evaluated. To support the evaluation process, a case study is presented with the
CIF3 language that will be attempted with all the other languages/tools. Each modeling lan-
guage/tool has been evaluated individually at first and then together with the others in the end.
In addition to the first evaluation, a proper basic introduction of all the modeling concepts that
each tool uses for modeling cyber-physical systems is provided and the building of the case study
as well. After that, in the second evaluation, the languages are extensively compared
against each other in terms of all the criteria set previously to see exactly the scope of
capabilities that each tools has. As a result from the two evaluations, a definitive review for
each language/tool is presented addressing their overall scope of capabilities, main strong
features, main uses, possible
ways of improving and future development.Outgoin
Active Learning for Reducing Labeling Effort in Text Classification Tasks
Labeling data can be an expensive task as it is usually performed manually by
domain experts. This is cumbersome for deep learning, as it is dependent on
large labeled datasets. Active learning (AL) is a paradigm that aims to reduce
labeling effort by only using the data which the used model deems most
informative. Little research has been done on AL in a text classification
setting and next to none has involved the more recent, state-of-the-art Natural
Language Processing (NLP) models. Here, we present an empirical study that
compares different uncertainty-based algorithms with BERT as the used
classifier. We evaluate the algorithms on two NLP classification datasets:
Stanford Sentiment Treebank and KvK-Frontpages. Additionally, we explore
heuristics that aim to solve presupposed problems of uncertainty-based AL;
namely, that it is unscalable and that it is prone to selecting outliers.
Furthermore, we explore the influence of the query-pool size on the performance
of AL. Whereas it was found that the proposed heuristics for AL did not improve
performance of AL; our results show that using uncertainty-based AL with
BERT outperforms random sampling of data. This difference in
performance can decrease as the query-pool size gets larger.Comment: Accepted as a conference paper at the joint 33rd Benelux Conference
on Artificial Intelligence and the 30th Belgian Dutch Conference on Machine
Learning (BNAIC/BENELEARN 2021). This camera-ready version submitted to
BNAIC/BENELEARN, adds several improvements including a more thorough
discussion of related work plus an extended discussion section. 28 pages
including references and appendice
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