Abdullah Al Maruf
Current Institution: University of Washington
Email: maruf3e@uw.edu
Bio: Abdullah Al Maruf received his B.Sc. degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) in 2014. He completed his Ph.D. from Washington State University, Pullman in December 2021 where his dissertation research was focused on control and estimation problems in dynamical networks. He is currently working as a postdoctoral scholar in Network Security Lab at Electrical and Computer Engineering department of University of Washington, Seattle. His current research interests include analysis and design of resilient networks and cyber-physical systems.
Abstract: Efficient Synthesis and Design of Resilient Cyber-Physical Systems
Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) such as autonomous vehicle networks and smart buildings are vulnerable to failures and attacks due to interconnections between components and the presence of cyber parts. An attack carried out by an intelligent adversary can potentially cause severe damage to the system and endanger human life. In such a scenario, it is important to design resilient solutions to ensure that the CPS will be able to revert to normal operation quickly and in a safe manner following an attack. Although the interconnections between cyber and physical components create vulnerabilities, a question of interest is whether these components’ individual properties and their interconnections can also be utilized to ensure safety and resilience. A challenge here is to obtain provable guarantees of safety that can be provided when cyber-attacks are carried out on legacy systems. My research efforts aim to address the above questions and challenges that arise in the area of resilient CPS, by making use of fundamental techniques from control, optimization, and networks. My current research is focus on the design and synthesis of resilient CPS with established guarantees for safe behaviors in the presence of adversaries by leveraging the inertia of physical components in a CPS and differences in timescales among interconnected systems. Along with my collaborators, we are developing an analytical framework for safety verification and computation of safety-ensuring control policy for distinct, seemingly unrelated resilient CPS architectures. We are also developing an analytic approach for interconnected systems, where we investigate the contribution of each system towards overall CPS safety so that the impacts of failures or attacks on some systems can be compensated by the actions of others. Our solution methodology aims to develop an index for each system which corresponds to the safety of the CPS, depending on which safety-ensuring control policies can be computed. I am also interested in using techniques from game theory, machine learning and cyber-security to develop robust and resilient solutions for CPS present in real world applications.