Research

Cybersecurity in control systems

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The security of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), like industrial control systems, has become a priority due to successful cyber attacks that damage physical processes. Some examples of such security incidents are: Stuxnet (2010), attacks on the Ukraine’s power system (2015, 2016), Triton attack against a petrochemical company in Saudi Arabia (2017), and a ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline (2021). My research in this area focused on using control theory to model CPS, build threat models, and study mechanisms to make such systems resilient against cyber attacks.

example evolution attack defense

Behavior of a bioreactor when two actors compete to stabilize and destabilize a system

Selected publications

  1. C. Barreto, A. A. Cardenas, and N. Quijano, “Controllability of dynamical systems: threat models and reactive security”, in 4th international conference on decision and game theory for security - volume 8252, GameSec 2013 (2013), pp. 45–64.

  2. J. Valente, C. Barreto, and A. A. Cardenas, “Cyber-physical systems attestation”, in 2014 ieee international conference on distributed computing in sensor systems (May 2014), pp. 354–357.

  3. C. Barreto, J. Giraldo, A. A. Cardenas, E. Mojica-Nava, and N. Quijano, “Control systems for the power grid and their resiliency to attacks”, IEEE Security Privacy 12, 15–23 (2014).