Cyber-Physical Security Research at UMBC's Eclipse Lab

This article focuses on the research and development work at the Eclipse Research Cluster at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) to address cybersecurity challenges. The research team is seeking to address cybersecurity challenges by employing a diverse set of specialty areas including Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Electrical Engineering. This group is looking at leveraging physical relationships to provide a diversity of measurement and reporting to not only improve anomaly detection, but also make decisions about how to keep critical functions operating even if only in a degraded mode. By exploiting the physical relationships between pressing a brake pedal and the operator’s leg position and the power consumption of a sensor and the instructions being run in it, this group proposes to provide new indicators that can be used to increase resilience to cyberattacks. This concept describes an example for a small section of a typical vehicle system. This group’s future research is seeking to expand this general approach of using the physical relationships of sensors to the properties they are measuring or actuators and the cause or effect of their action.