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

离散事件系统是一类重要的动态系统，具有离散状态空间和事件驱动动态特性。要控制一个系统，就需要影响它的行为以实现预期目标。在安全和隐私方面，这相当于确保系统信息流的某些部分是保密的，或者只有授权的代理人才能访问特定的信息。这种影响的实现需要结合各种数学技术的设备(或控制器)的综合。当需要一个以上的控制器来实现所需的系统行为时，就会出现分布式控制问题。网络物理系统将计算(如联网和传感)和物理组件集成在一起，并将它们连接到互联网和彼此。面向服务的体系结构(通常称为“未来的互联网”)也产生了分布式系统，在这种情况下，分布式系统由独立的服务网络组成。理解网络物理系统的一种方法是将它们作为面向服务的体系结构的实现来研究。该研究计划的贡献将提供新的方法来建模和验证网络物理系统中的安全和隐私政策，方法是利用面向服务的架构中类似问题的新结果。将控制理论和优化技术融入分布式安全问题，将为如何保护基于Web的服务的数据提供重要的洞察力，这是面向服务的架构的应用，并提供对网络物理系统试验台中组件的安全访问，网络物理系统试验台是由家用电器与智能电表通信组成的智能电网试验台。

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.