Announcement of New Graduate Research Assistantship Position for CS and ECE PhD or MS (Thesis) Students

Topic: Secure Distributed Protocols for Cyber-Physical Systems

Saurabh Bagchi, Aniket Kate
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Department of Computer Science
Purdue University

 

Group Logo

 

Posted: June 25, 2020.

We are looking for a Graduate Research Assistant on a newly funded project from the Army Research Lab (ARL) on secure and energy-efficient distributed protocols for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). The position is available now. The project has guaranteed funding for 3 years starting June 2020. The interview process will start now and will conclude once a qualified applicant is identified.

Who should apply: PhD student in ECE or CS in 1st or 2nd year of study. Exceptional Masters (thesis) student in ECE/CS in 1st year will also be considered.

Characteristics of applicants: Interest in distributed protocols, applied crypto, lightweight data analytics. Good system building skills.

Desired skills: Programming in C on embedded devices.

Project team: The project is supervised jointly by Profs. Saurabh Bagchi and Aniket Kate, and involves another graduate student. There is close collaboration with two other faculty members, one at Purdue and one at Duke. Stellar undergraduate students will be hired to aid the Graduate RAs.

Citizenship requirement: None

Problem Statement
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are used for sensing the environment, for situational awareness, and in cases, for actuation. These devices are playing an increasingly important role in a networked setting for autonomous tasking and mission planning. Since they are embedded in the physical spaces in hazardous environments, they operate under malicious attacks and challenging communication environments. In several scenarios, the network of CPS devices have to coordinate to aid in a mission and such coordination happens through message passing among the devices. There is a requirement that such coordination be achieved even in the face of malicious attacks and degraded communication (such as, lack of connectivity between sets of devices). We aim to solve this problem in this project, while ensuring that our distributed protocol is energy efficient. We propose to achieve this through the use of distributed consensus protocol that we will design specifically for the wireless-enabled CPS devices and taking advantage of the network effect of these devices. The protocol may use Blockchain-based consensus, with appropriate modification for the energy constrained environment. Our discoveries will be instantiated in a testbed of embedded devices with a variety of wireless connectivity modules, which will be subject to induced error conditions and attacks.
Two representative papers that give a flavor of this kind of work are:

  1. Abraham, I., D. Malkhi, K. Nayak, L. Ren, and M. Yin. "Sync HotStuff: Simple and Practical Synchronous State Machine Replication." In 2020 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP), pp. 654-667.

  2. Almakhdhub, N.S., Clements, A.A., Payer, M. and Bagchi, S., 2019, June. Benchiot: A security benchmark for the internet of things. In 2019 49th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) (pp. 234-246).

Application procedure
Send an email note to Profs. Bagchi and Kate with subject "ARL RA application" and with your CV (in pdf) and answers to the following specific questions in the body of the email. Qualified candidates will be invited for interviews.

  1. When did you start your Masters/PhD?

  2. What are your grades in courses at Purdue?

  3. What was your rank in your undergraduate department (e.g., 3rd among 50 students in Computer Science)?

  4. What are your grades in programming courses in your undergraduate?

  5. Is there a Purdue person (professor, supervisor, etc.) who can speak about your qualifications?