Dr. Rijad Alisic, a Postdoctoral Scholar from the Division of Decision and Control Systems at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, visited CDSL and delivered a seminar titled ‘Understanding the Learning Attacker in Cyber-Physical Systems’.
In his seminar, Dr. Alisic addressed the growing threats of cyberattacks on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and their potential to disrupt critical sectors such as the economy, security, and public health. He introduced a novel framework for modeling attackers from a defender’s perspective. Rather than assuming a specific attacker objective, his approach considers the capabilities an attacker can learn from system-generated information. This method reveals insights into the attacker’s learning process, independent of their ultimate goals, and provides valuable tools for risk analysis. He highlighted system privacy as a key factor in mitigating these risks and demonstrated how attackers could bypass defensive schemes, such as homomorphic encryption, by exploiting learned system vulnerabilities. The seminar also showcased how Dr. Alisic’s analysis sheds light on the strategies attackers use to outmaneuver defenses, offering actionable guidance to fortify CPS against such threats.
The seminar was highly informative and engaging, providing CDSL students and researchers with valuable insights into the evolving challenges of CPS security.
We thank Dr. Alisic for his thought-provoking presentation and look forward to potential collaborations in this critical area of research.