Evaluating Cascading Impact of Attacks on Resilience of Industrial Control Systems: A Design-Centric Modeling Approach

A design-centric modeling approach was proposed to model the behaviour of the physical processes controlled by Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and study the cascading impact of data-oriented attacks. A threat model was used as input to guide the construction of the CPS model where control components which are within the adversary's intent and capabilities are extracted. The relevant control components are subsequently modeled together with their control dependencies and operational design specifications. The approach was demonstrated and validated on a water treatment testbed. Attacks were simulated on the testbed model where its resilience to attacks was evaluated using proposed metrics such as Impact Ratio and Time-to-Critical-State. From the analysis of the attacks, design strengths and weaknesses were identified and design improvements were recommended to increase the testbed's resilience to attacks

Energy efficiency in rice production systems of Purificacion (Tolima)

P?ginas 33-38Se determin? la eficiencia energ?tica de sistemas de producci?n de arroz en Purificaci?n (Tolima). La energ?a requerida para producir 1 kg de arroz fluctu? entre 314 kcal en un sistema org?nico orientado a mercados selectivos y 696 kcal en el sistema prevaleciente de altos insumos qu?micos. La relaci?n costo-beneficio no es significativamente diferente para estos dos sistemas, aunque se advierte que en el segundo se generan impactos tanto ambientales como sociales, que deben evaluarse en el contexto del departamento del Tolima. Desde el punto vista de la sostenibilidad, se advierte c?mo el determinismo econ?mico, proyectado en el ?mbito gremial y en la configuraci?n de unidades productivas arroceras, no restituye y a?n menos preserva atributos ambientales de los territorios donde la actividad se ha desarrollado.ABSTRACT. Energy efficiency in rice production systems was evaluated in Purificaci?n, Tolima (a province in Colombia). The energy required to produce 1 kg of rice ranged from 314 kcal in an organic rice system oriented to selective markets, to 696 kcal in the major system of higher chemical inputs. Benefit-cost relationship is not different for these two systems, although it is warned that in the second there are probably impacts both environmental and social that must be evaluated in the context of Tolima provinces. Form the sustainability perspective, some economics determinism is perceived with gremial and farm level projection, and in the setting of rice producing units, there is not restitution or even less preservation of environmental attributes from territories where rice activity has been developing

Dynamics of quartz tuning fork force sensors used in scanning probe microscopy

We have performed an experimental characterization of the dynamics of oscillating quartz tuning forks which are being increasingly used in scanning probe microscopy as force sensors. We show that tuning forks can be described as a system of coupled oscillators. Nevertheless, this description requires the knowledge of the elastic coupling constant between the prongs of the tuning fork, which has not yet been measured. Therefore tuning forks have been usually described within the single oscillator or the weakly coupled oscillators approximation that neglects the coupling between the prongs. We propose three different procedures to measure the elastic coupling constant: an opto-mechanical method, a variation of the Cleveland method and a thermal noise based method. We find that the coupling between the quartz tuning fork prongs has a strong influence on the dynamics and the measured motion is in remarkable agreement with a simple model of coupled harmonic oscillators. The precise determination of the elastic coupling between the prongs of a tuning fork allows to obtain a quantitative relation between the resonance frequency shift and the force gradient acting at the free end of a tuning fork prong.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures, 2 Table

Carbon-fiber tips for scanning probe microscopes and molecular electronics experiments

We fabricate and characterize carbon-fiber tips for their use in combined scanning tunneling and force microscopy based on piezoelectric quartz tuning fork force sensors. An electrochemical fabrication procedure to etch the tips is used to yield reproducible sub-100-nm apex. We also study electron transport through single-molecule junctions formed by a single octanethiol molecule bonded by the thiol anchoring group to a gold electrode and linked to a carbon tip by the methyl group. We observe the presence of conductance plateaus during the stretching of the molecular bridge, which is the signature of the formation of a molecular junction.Comment: Conference Proceeding (Trends in NanoTechnology 2011, Tenerife SPAIN); Nanoscale Research Letters, (2012) 7:25

Excitations of limited-diffraction waves approaching the classical 0-order x-wave by rectangular waveforms

AbstractIn this paper, an approach for simplifying the experimental arrangement, needed to generate limited diffracting waves through annular ultrasonic arrays, is analyzed in terms mainly of the subsequent acoustic field. The main idea is to approximate the theoretical X-wave electrical excitations to rectangular driving signals in each array annulus, by means of the L2 curve criterion. The differences between theoretical X-wave signals and these approximate signals, related to real excitation effects, were minimized by using the transition times and amplitudes of the rectangular signals as fitting parameters.Acoustic field simulations, based on the impulse response technique, are applied for evaluating the agreement degree between both emitted ultrasonic fields, whit the calculated classical X wave and with the new approximation method proposed here for low-cost limited-diffraction wave generation. In addition, source vibration and ultrasonic field simulated signals were compared with those of the classic x wave under an exact driving, with the purpose of validating the method.The good agreement between the two vibration signals and resulting field distributions, obtained from the classical X wave excitations and those provided by the drastic simplification presented here, can be justified by the filtering effects induced by the transducer elements bands in frequency domain. These results suggest the possibility of achieving limited diffraction waves with relatively simple driving waveforms, which can be implemented with a moderate cost in analogical electronics

Finite Size Effects in Separable Recurrent Neural Networks

We perform a systematic analytical study of finite size effects in separable recurrent neural network models with sequential dynamics, away from saturation. We find two types of finite size effects: thermal fluctuations, and disorder-induced `frozen' corrections to the mean-field laws. The finite size effects are described by equations that correspond to a time-dependent Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. We show how the theory can be used to understand and quantify various finite size phenomena in recurrent neural networks, with and without detailed balance.Comment: 24 pages LaTex, with 4 postscript figures include