This proposal seeks funding for the Center for Autonomic Computing (CAC) studies conducted by the University of Florida site (lead) and the University of Arizona site. Funding Requests for Fundamental Research are authorized by an NSF approved solicitation, NSF 10-507. The solicitation invites I/UCRCs to submit proposals for support of industry-defined fundamental research.
This project proposal focuses on autonomic computing and systems, applicable to the important areas of security, fault management, and data centers. Planned are the prototypes to be deployed on test bed environments driven by the requirements from industry. The most interesting part of the proposal are applications to SCADA environments, which integrate monitoring, multi-level behavior analysis, decision fusion and risk analysis relative to security of SCADA environments. Other areas include autonomic peer-to-peer systems, as well as study related to the data centers, both at the application layer and data center hardware, where focus is on robustness.
The successful completion of this project will represent a significant step toward the design and deployment of highly secure SCADA systems and networks. In addition to security, the autonomic detection of anomalies in applications or subsystems of a datacenter addresses inefficiencies in data center design by eliminating the dependence on over-provisioning, which is a resource-inefficient strategy for ensuring quality of service by trying to offset any sub-system failures and malfunctions. The project has also potential for broader impact on data-intensive applications that leverage the availability of ad-hoc desktop grids for high-throughput computing.
As energy critical infrastructures (power, water, gas and oil) starting to modernize their industrial control systems to build what is referred to as "Smart Grid" that uses advanced computing and communications technologies to bring knowledge to power grid so it can operate more efficiently than what is feasible using current grid technologies that are isolated, and manual intensive. The widespread use of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems in critical energy infrastructures (gas, oil, and electrical power) makes them vulnerable to both internal and external attacks. To make the matter even worse, SCADA systems were never designed with security in mind and securing them is a challenging research problem. Consequently, SCADA networks become a prime target for cyber attacks due to the profound and catastrophic impacts they can inject to our economy and all aspects of our life. SCADA systems can be viewed as distributed control systems where human operators control the environment through Human-Machine Interfaces (HMI). Through the HMI, the operators can control the SCADA subsystems that include Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs), Remote Terminal Units (RTUs) and Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs). With the use of information technology in SCADA systems, they become susceptible to all cyber attacks that might control all SCADA programs from remote sites located on the Internet. Current commercial intrusion detection and protection tools and techniques have failed to secure and protect our cyber infrastructure as we can tell from the frequent news of successful cyberattacks on our information systems and services. These techniques are based on signature based methods and cannot detect new and novel attacks. An innovative approach based on autonomic computing technology that is analogous to the human nervous system where computing systems and applications can be self-configured, self-optimized, self-healed and self-protected with little involvement from the users and/or system administrators has been developed in this project by the University of Arizona Center for Autonomic Computing, AVIRTEK and Raytheon. To test and evaluate the self-protection algorithms, we have successfully implemented a critical infrastructure test-bed that is sponsored by Raytheon, AVIRTEK, and University of Arizona as shown in Figure 1. The main goal of the test-bed is to experiment with and evaluate the integration of Raytheon and AVIRTEK technologies and Autonomic agents developed at the Center to achieve the following objectives: 1) Autonomic control and management of different power generation technologies; 2) Integrate Raytheon technologies with AVIRTEK Autonomic Software Protection System (ASPS) and Autonomic agents to build the next generation of Autonomic Critical Infrastructure Protection (AutoCiP) system; and 3) Evaluate the autonomic protection strategies against cyber and physical attacks. The test-bed will be an invaluable resource to develop, experiment with and evaluate the security and protection functions and services.
