PRESS RELEASE
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Hiccups and failures in consumer cyber-physical systems such as smart gadgets and appliances are inconvenient and annoying. But in mission-critical applications for the Department of Defense, any weakness or defect in the system could have serious consequences, such as disruptions, damage or even loss of life.
To help mitigate the problem, a group of researchers at Purdue University launched a multidisciplinary project to model, simulate and analyze cyber-physical systems (CPS), with the goal of making such systems more robust and making systems analysis more scalable and effective. Codenamed FIREFLY, the multi-phase, $6.5 million project is sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under its Faithful Integrated Reverse-engineering and Exploitation (FIRE) program.
A technically interesting aspect of the research is that, for a CPS with multiple computing and physical components, individual components may not appear faulty or vulnerable. But when components start to interact, weaknesses or vulnerabilities can manifest themselves in unexpected ways: “When it comes to the security of system components and the overall system, one plus one can be less than two. And we are particularly interested in exposing and analyzing such system-of-systems weaknesses,” says Dongyan Xu, Samuel Conte Professor of Computer Science and principal investigator of the FIREFLY project.
Read more about research at the Purdue Office of Research website.