Resilience and Security of Cyber-Physical Systems: Self-Driving Cars and Smart Devices

Karthik Pattabiraman, University of British Columbia
Host: Yair Amir

The future will be defined by autonomous computer systems that are tightly integrated with the environment, also known as Cyber-Physical systems (CPS). Resilience and security become extremely important in these systems, as even a single error or security attack can have catastrophic consequences. In this talk, I will consider the resilience and security challenges of CPS, and how to protect them at low costs. I will give examples of two research projects in my group, one on improving the resilience of Deep Neural Network(DNN) accelerators deployed in self-driving cars, and the other on deploying host-based intrusion detection systems (IDS) on smart embedded devices such as smart electric meters and smart medical devices. Finally, I will discuss some of our ongoing work in this area, and the challenges and opportunities. This is joint work with my students and industry collaborators.

Speaker Biography

Karthik Pattabiraman received his M.S and PhD. degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2004 and 2009 respectively. After a post-doctoral stint at Microsoft Research (MSR), Karthik joined the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 2010, where he is now an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. Karthik’s research interests are in building error-resilient software systems, and in software engineering and security. Karthik has won distinguished paper/runner up awards at the IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), 2018, the IEEE International Conference on Software Testing (ICST), 2013, the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2014, He is a recipient of the distinguished alumni early career award from UIUC’s Computer Science department in 2018, the NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement (DAS) award in 2015, and the 2018 Killam Faculty Research Prize, and 2016 Killam Faculty Research Fellowship at UBC. He also won the William Carter award in 2008 for best PhD thesis in the area of fault-tolerant computing. Karthik is a senior member of the IEEE, and the vice-chair of the IFIP Working Group on Dependable Computing and Fault-Tolerance (10.4).