Computer Science Colloquium
Friday, December 09
2:35pm in Wege Auditorium
Toward Intrusion-Tolerant Critical Infrastructure
As critical infrastructure systems are becoming increasingly exposed to malicious attacks, it is crucial to ensure that they can withstand sophisticated attacks while continuing to operate correctly and at their expected level of performance.
In this talk, I will present our work on making intrusion-tolerant critical infrastructure systems possible and practical. I will start by discussing our Spire system, the first Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system for the power grid that is resilient to both system-level compromises and sophisticated network-level attacks.
Then, I will present our recent work offering a practical deployment path for Spire and similar BFT-based systems through a new model for “intrusion tolerance as a service”. The intrusion-tolerance-as-a-service model enables critical infrastructure operators to gain the resilience benefits of intrusion tolerance, while offloading significant parts of the system management to a service provider. Critically for practical acceptance, our work shows how these benefits can be achieved without requiring critical infrastructure operators to expose confidential or proprietary data and algorithms to the service provider.
Amy Babay is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh, where she leads the Resilient Systems and Societies Lab (https://rsslab.io/). Her research interests are in distributed systems and computer networks, with particular interests in building dependable critical infrastructure systems and enabling new internet services with demanding performance requirements.