EMBEDDING INTELLIGENCE IN INDUSTRIAL SYSTEMS BY: ARVIND SUNDARAM
P
icture the scene from the movie Independence Day (1996) where a team of scientists capture and reverse-engineer an alien spaceship enabling Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum to fake their way into the mothership. An alien operator grants them access on the mistaken belief that the spaceship is genuine. That movie could have ended very differently if the mothership was self-aware enough to distinguish fake from real instead of trusting the alien operator that proved to be its undoing. Analogously, critical industrial systems in real life often face the same conundrum with an inability to distinguish between covertly falsified data and genuine operational data. As modern industry embraces digitalization, the increased interconnectivity of “smart” devices often creates multiple avenues for malicious agents to remotely interact with industrial systems and cause physical damage. The replay attack, popularized by the Stuxnet virus in 2010, greatly exploited this observation by replaying past data to mislead operators and statistical detectors while it covertly destroyed several centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear facility in Iran. While many security paradigms have been proposed since, my research identifies a key gap in that these measures are often trust-based, like the alien operator, or can be reverse-engineered by knowledgeable adversaries, like the scientists in Independence Day. My present work, Covert Cognizance (C2), fills this gap by inducing self-awareness (cognizance) in industrial systems in a discreet manner (covert). It serves as an additional layer of defense at the process level when security measures such as passwords, biometrics, communication protocols, hardware signatures, etc. have been bypassed by sophisticated adversaries. While existing systems follow a
InnovatED | Issue 3 | Page 4
