Contact: HJ Siegel (H.J.Siegel@colostate.edu)

Abstract: This talk will discuss the problem of protecting the control systems which monitor and regulate our critical infrastructure installations against devastating cyber-attacks (think for a moment about being without electrical power and water for a really long time!) Such an attack happened in the Ukraine on December 23, 2015 when three power control centers were simultaneously attacked and power was disrupted for two thirds of the country. The first half of this talk will include an overviews of this and two other successful attacks against supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, followed by a short discussion of some of the approaches by US agencies and academic researchers to mitigating these threats and their potential consequences. The second half of the talk will discuss in depth the use of the verified micro-kernel, seL4, together with trusted software components to achieve improved security in industrial control systems.


Bio: Dr. James H. Graham earned the Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in 1972, and the Master of Science and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Purdue University in 1978 and 1980, respectively, despite the questionable influence of one Dr. HJ Siegel. He began his engineering career as a product and process design engineer with General Motors Corporation, and later served as a faculty member at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, before joining the faculty of the University of Louisville in 1985. He served as Henry Vogt Professor of Computer Science and Engineering from 1991-2014, and as Chairman of the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 2006-2013. He has been a consultant to a number of companies, including General Electric, GTE Laboratories (now part of Verizon), defense contractor Science and Engineering Systems, Inc (SESI) and several high-technology startups. He is a senior life member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), a member of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) and a senior member of the International Society for Computers and Their Applications (ISCA). His current research is focused on cyber-security of industrial control systems, with applications in the chemical industry, the water sector, the dams sector and the electrical power industry. He also has expertise in computer simulation, robotics, intelligent systems, power systems engineering and computational intelligence. Dr. Graham is the editor of two books, and the author or coauthor of over 250 technical publications.