Distributed Discrete-Event Systems: the design of security and privacy for cyber-physical systems

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Discrete-event systems are an important class of dynamical systems, featuring discrete state spaces and event-driven dynamics. To control a system involves influencing its behaviour to achieve a desired goal. In the context of security and privacy, this amounts to ensuring that certain parts of a system's information flow are kept confidential or that only authorized agents can access particular pieces of information. The implementation of this influence requires the synthesis of devices (or controllers) that incorporate a variety of mathematical techniques. A distributed control problem arises when more than one controller is required to achieve the desired system behaviour.  Cyber-physical systems integrate computational (such as networking and sensing) and physical components and connect them to the Internet and to each other. Service-oriented architectures (often called "the future Internet") also give rise to distributed systems, in this case, comprised of a network of independent services. One way of understanding cyber-physical systems is to study them as an implementation of service-oriented architectures. The contributions of the research program will provide new ways to model and verify security and privacy policies in cyber-physical systems, by leveraging emerging results on similar issues in service-oriented architectures. Incorporating control-theoretic and optimization techniques to distributed security problems will provide significant insight into how to protect data for web-based services, an application of service-oriented architectures, and provide secure access to components in a testbed of a cyber-physical system, a smart grid testbed consisting of home appliances communicating with a smart meter.