A C2SR Colloquia Series | Distinguished Webinar Series.
The Distinguished Speaker Webinar Series is aimed at advancing the state-of-the-art concepts and methods in artificial intelligence and cyber security areas. The series is jointly hosted by the Centers for Cyber Security and AI Research and the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (SEECS) at the University of North Dakota College of Engineering & Mines.
Speaker Biography:
Dr. Dong (Kevin) Jin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Arkansas. He earned his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on cybersecurity, networking, cyber-physical system security and resilience, as well as the modeling and simulation of large-scale systems. Dr. Jin and his team have received five Best Paper Awards from conferences, such as IEEE SmartGridComm, IET Cyber-Physical Systems: Theory & Applications, and ACM SIGSIM PADS. He currently serves as an Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS) and is a member of the steering committee for ACM SIGSIM PADS. He also created the CS Master of Cybersecurity Program at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he served as the Founding Program Director. Dr. Jin is a recipient of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Program (YIP) award.
About the Webinar:
Modern industrial control systems (ICS) are increasingly adopting Internet technology to boost control efficiency, which unfortunately opens up a new front for a potential “cyber Pearl Harbor.” People typically apply existing security techniques, such as firewalls or anti-virus software, to secure ICSes. However, those solutions can only provide fine-grained protection at single devices. In this talk, we present a novel software-defined networking (SDN) based communication architecture for microgrid operations, with the goal of building a resilient and secure microgrid in the face of growing cyber-attacks and human errors. We leverage the global visibility, direct networking controllability, and programmability offered by SDN to investigate multiple security applications, including self-healing network management, real-time and uncertainty-aware network verification, and resilient network forwarding. To enable high-fidelity evaluation of those applications in large-scale settings, we also develop a hybrid testbed combining virtual-machine-based network emulation and power system simulation using our kernel-based virtual time system.