ABSTRACT

Autonomous and connected vehicles technologies are rapidly emerging in the modern railway domain. Traditional standalone systems are now becoming more sophisticated, consequently resulting in more distributed interfaces, and a larger attack surface. As such, there now exists a tightly coupled nature between the cyber and physical components that now makes a cyber-attack not only capable of exfiltrating sensitive data, but also manipulating safetycritical operations of the system. This manipulation can cause the train to experience unsafe conditions, and can potentially lead to devestating consequences such as derailments, explosions, and collisions. These facts make it as important as ever to ensure the security, and resilience of railway infrastructure at the earliest stages of design, making deployment infrastructure more safe, reliable, and predictable in a compromising environment. In this poster we demonstrate how to analyze the security and resilience of railway infrastructure by utilizing a domain specific simlation based framework. Our framework includes a simulation cluster with both transportation and network modeling capabilities, a graphical experiment manager to rapidly develop attack scenarios againt railway networks, and a results dashboard that includes real time visualization of various metrics from within the simulation. Additionally, we not only support software-in-the-loop, but have integrated a hardware-in-the-loop testbed to test realistic attacks that occur within the deployment environment. We illustrate the capabilities of our developed framework with a connected railway case study of the Washington D.C Metro rail network.

BIO

Bradley Potteiger is a PhD student in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Vanderbilt University with a research affiliation at the Institute for Software Integrated Systems. He received his MS. degree from Vanderbilt University in Electrical Engineering and his BS. degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His research at Vanderbilt is focused on Cyber Physical System (CPS) security with respect to protecting safety critical systems. Through his research he has worked with various research organizations within the government sector and industry.