Prof Chris Hankin, Imperial College London, UK

Abstract

We identify some of the particular challenges that are encountered when trying to secure cyber-physical systems. We describe three of our current activities: the architecture of a system for monitoring cyber-physical systems; a new approach to modelling dependencies in such systems which leads to a measurement of the security of the system – interpreted as the least effort that an attacker has to expend to compromise the operation; and an approach to optimising the diversity of products used in a system with a view to slowing the propagation of malware. We conclude by discussing how these different threads of work contribute to meeting the challenges and identify possible avenues for future development, as well as providing some pointers to other work.

Biography

Chris Hankin joined the Department of Computing at Imperial College London in 1984 and was promoted to Professor in 1995. He was Director and then Co-Director of the Institute for Security Science and Technology from 2010 until 2019. His research is in cyber security, data analytics and theoretical computer science. He leads multidisciplinary projects focused on providing better decision support to defend against cyber attacks for both enterprise systems and industrial control systems. He is Director of the UK Research Institute on Trustworthy Inter-connected Cyber-physical Systems (RITICS) which focuses on cyber security of critical infrastructure.