With the advent of smart infrastructures, smart buildings, smart grids, smart industry and manufacturing, and smart cities and governments have created more new vulnerabilities than would exist if they were isolated from one another. Sophisticated cyberattacks can exploit these vulnerabilities to disrupt or even completely disable the operations of these infrastructures and consequently can severely impact our national security and all aspects of our life and economy. To overcome the cybersecurity challenges introduced by smart infrastructures, researchers and educators need to better understand the interdependencies among these infrastructures, their implications on cybersecurity issues and how to develop effective defense and protective protection solutions.
The main goal of this project is to explore innovative algorithms to allow the investigators and students to access resources across multiple and heterogeneous testbeds. This approach has the potential to provide new capabilities to conduct important research such as:
1. How to model, and predict operations and interactions among complex, large, heterogeneous, and dynamic federation of cybersecurity and cyberphysical testbeds; 2. How to secure and protect smart infrastructure resources and services and their interactions under normal and abnormal situations that may be caused by nature, accident, or malicious actions; and 3. How to develop an innovative teaching and training experiments to provide hands-on experiences on how to discover existing or newly created vulnerabilities within an infrastructure or caused by the interactions with other infrastructures, detect and protect their operations against malicious attacks.
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) are adopted to develop the federated smart infrastructure testbed in order to enable researchers and educators to publish/discover testbeds that are needed for their research and educational programs. Initially, the Ford Breadboard Smart Car testbed available at the University of Detroit-Mercy, and UA testbeds including IoT Testbed, Virtual Cybersecurity Testbed that is currently hosted on Amazon public cloud, and Wireless Security Testbed are used for federation, experimentation and evaluation. Open communication standards and security tools that are developed at the NSF Center for Cloud and Autonomic Computing are used to maintain the security and privacy of the federated security testbed. These services allow heterogeneous testbeds to communicate their data syntactically and semantically, enabling accurate interpretation of the semantics of data received and the dependencies among these testbeds.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
