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Detecting cyber attacks in cyber-physical systems

Speaker: 
Alexander J. Gallo
Data dell'evento: 
Tuesday, 25 November, 2025 - 11:00
Luogo: 
Aula B203
Contatto: 
Andrea Cristofaro, cristofaro@diag.uniroma1.it

Abstract: Recent years have seen the onset of cyber threats against a number of cyber-physical systems, including safety-critical infrastructure, such as power distribution grids and water networks. Secure control has arisen as a counterpart to traditional IT security as a means to diagnose the presence of cyber attacks, as well as to accommodate their effects. In this talk, I will start by addressing the problem of cyber-attack detection in cyber-physical systems, highlighting known structural properties which must hold for attacks to remain undetectable. I will then show how in large-scale systems locally secure information can be leveraged to ensure attacks remain detectable, and how this information can be further exploited to reconstruct secure local state estimates. Finally, I will show how active techniques can be used to thwart these structural conditions, by altering the system's behavior compared to the attacker's internal model.

 
Bio: Alexander J Gallo received the M.Eng. and his Ph.D. degree in Control Engineering from Imperial College London, London, UK, in 2016 and 2021. From 2021 to 2024 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Delft Center for Systems and Control, Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands. Since Sep 2024, he is a postdoctoral researcher at the Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy. His main research interests include distributed cyber-security and fault tolerant control for large-scale interconnected systems, with a particular focus on energy distribution networks, as well as health-aware and fault tolerant control of wind turbines. More recently, he has been working on providing guarantees to data-driven decision and control problems with the scenario approach.
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