Matching Items (33)
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Description
The electric power system is one of the largest, most complicated, and most important cyber-physical systems in the world. The link between the cyber and physical level is the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems and Energy Management Systems (EMS). Their functions include monitoring the real-time system operation

The electric power system is one of the largest, most complicated, and most important cyber-physical systems in the world. The link between the cyber and physical level is the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems and Energy Management Systems (EMS). Their functions include monitoring the real-time system operation through state estimation (SE), controlling the system to operate reliably, and optimizing the system operation efficiency. The SCADA acquires the noisy measurements, such as voltage angle and magnitude, line power flows, and line current magnitude, from the remote terminal units (RTUs). These raw data are firstly sent to the SE, which filters all the noisy data and derives the best estimate of the system state. Then the estimated states are used for other EMS functions, such as contingency analysis, optimal power flow, etc.

In the existing state estimation process, there is no defense mechanism for any malicious attacks. Once the communication channel between the SCADA and RTUs is hijacked by the attacker, the attacker can perform a man-in-middle attack and send data of its choice. The only step that can possibly detect the attack during the state estimation process is the bad data detector. Unfortunately, even the bad data detector is unable to detect a certain type of attack, known as the false data injection (FDI) attacks.

Diagnosing the physical consequences of such attacks, therefore, is very important to understand system stability. In this thesis, theoretical general attack models for AC and DC attacks are given and an optimization problem for the worst-case overload attack is formulated. Furthermore, physical consequences of FDI attacks, based on both DC and AC model, are addressed. Various scenarios with different attack targets and system configurations are simulated. The details of the research, results obtained and conclusions drawn are presented in this document.
ContributorsLiang, Jingwen (Author) / Sankar, Lalitha (Thesis advisor) / Kosut, Oliver (Thesis advisor) / Hedman, Kory (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
RF convergence of radar and communications users is rapidly becoming an issue for a multitude of stakeholders. To hedge against growing spectral congestion, research into cooperative radar and communications systems has been identified as a critical necessity for the United States and other countries. Further, the joint sensing-communicating paradigm appears

RF convergence of radar and communications users is rapidly becoming an issue for a multitude of stakeholders. To hedge against growing spectral congestion, research into cooperative radar and communications systems has been identified as a critical necessity for the United States and other countries. Further, the joint sensing-communicating paradigm appears imminent in several technological domains. In the pursuit of co-designing radar and communications systems that work cooperatively and benefit from each other's existence, joint radar-communications metrics are defined and bounded as a measure of performance. Estimation rate is introduced, a novel measure of radar estimation information as a function of time. Complementary to communications data rate, the two systems can now be compared on the same scale. An information-centric approach has a number of advantages, defining precisely what is gained through radar illumination and serves as a measure of spectral efficiency. Bounding radar estimation rate and communications data rate jointly, systems can be designed as a joint optimization problem.
ContributorsPaul, Bryan (Author) / Bliss, Daniel W. (Thesis advisor) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Kosut, Oliver (Committee member) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
In this dissertation, I propose potential techniques to improve the quality-of-service (QoS) of real-time applications in cognitive radio (CR) systems. Unlike best-effort applications, real-time applications, such as audio and video, have a QoS that need to be met. There are two different frameworks that are used to study the QoS

In this dissertation, I propose potential techniques to improve the quality-of-service (QoS) of real-time applications in cognitive radio (CR) systems. Unlike best-effort applications, real-time applications, such as audio and video, have a QoS that need to be met. There are two different frameworks that are used to study the QoS in the literature, namely, the average-delay and the hard-deadline frameworks. In the former, the scheduling algorithm has to guarantee that the packet's average delay is below a prespecified threshold while the latter imposes a hard deadline on each packet in the system. In this dissertation, I present joint power allocation and scheduling algorithms for each framework and show their applications in CR systems which are known to have strict power limitations so as to protect the licensed users from interference.

A common aspect of the two frameworks is the packet service time. Thus, the effect of multiple channels on the service time is studied first. The problem is formulated as an optimal stopping rule problem where it is required to decide at which channel the SU should stop sensing and begin transmission. I provide a closed-form expression for this optimal stopping rule and the optimal transmission power of secondary user (SU).

The average-delay framework is then presented in a single CR channel system with a base station (BS) that schedules the SUs to minimize the average delay while protecting the primary users (PUs) from harmful interference. One of the contributions of the proposed algorithm is its suitability for heterogeneous-channels systems where users with statistically low channel quality suffer worse delay performances. The proposed algorithm guarantees the prespecified delay performance to each SU without violating the PU's interference constraint.

Finally, in the hard-deadline framework, I propose three algorithms that maximize the system's throughput while guaranteeing the required percentage of packets to be transmitted by their deadlines. The proposed algorithms work in heterogeneous systems where the BS is serving different types of users having real-time (RT) data and non-real-time (NRT) data. I show that two of the proposed algorithms have the low complexity where the power policies of both the RT and NRT users are in closed-form expressions and a low-complexity scheduler.
ContributorsEwaisha, Ahmed Emad (Author) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Thesis advisor) / Ying, Lei (Committee member) / Bliss, Daniel (Committee member) / Kosut, Oliver (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
The electric power system is monitored via an extensive network of sensors in tandem with data processing algorithms, i.e., an intelligent cyber layer, that enables continual observation and control of the physical system to ensure reliable operations. This data collection and processing system is vulnerable to cyber-attacks that impact the

The electric power system is monitored via an extensive network of sensors in tandem with data processing algorithms, i.e., an intelligent cyber layer, that enables continual observation and control of the physical system to ensure reliable operations. This data collection and processing system is vulnerable to cyber-attacks that impact the system operation status and lead to serious physical consequences, including systematic problems and failures.

This dissertation studies the physical consequences of unobservable false data injection (FDI) attacks wherein the attacker maliciously changes supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) or phasor measurement unit (PMU) measurements, on the electric power system. In this context, the dissertation is divided into three parts, in which the first two parts focus on FDI attacks on SCADA and the last part focuses on FDI attacks on PMUs.

The first part studies the physical consequences of FDI attacks on SCADA measurements designed with limited system information. The attacker is assumed to have perfect knowledge inside a sub-network of the entire system. Two classes of attacks with different assumptions on the attacker's knowledge outside of the sub-network are introduced. In particular, for the second class of attacks, the attacker is assumed to have no information outside of the attack sub-network, but can perform multiple linear regression to learn the relationship between the external network and the attack sub-network with historical data. To determine the worst possible consequences of both classes of attacks, a bi-level optimization problem wherein the first level models the attacker's goal and the second level models the system response is introduced.

The second part of the dissertation concentrates on analyzing the vulnerability of systems to FDI attacks from the perspective of the system. To this end, an off-line vulnerability analysis framework is proposed to identify the subsets of the test system that are more prone to FDI attacks.

The third part studies the vulnerability of PMUs to FDI attacks. Two classes of more sophisticated FDI attacks that capture the temporal correlation of PMU data are introduced. Such attacks are designed with a convex optimization problem and can always bypass both the bad data detector and the low-rank decomposition (LD) detector.
ContributorsZhang, Jiazi (Author) / Sankar, Lalitha (Thesis advisor) / Kosut, Oliver (Committee member) / Hedman, Kory (Committee member) / Vittal, Vijay (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
Fundamental limits of fixed-to-variable (F-V) and variable-to-fixed (V-F) length universal source coding at short blocklengths is characterized. For F-V length coding, the Type Size (TS) code has previously been shown to be optimal up to the third-order rate for universal compression of all memoryless sources over finite alphabets. The TS

Fundamental limits of fixed-to-variable (F-V) and variable-to-fixed (V-F) length universal source coding at short blocklengths is characterized. For F-V length coding, the Type Size (TS) code has previously been shown to be optimal up to the third-order rate for universal compression of all memoryless sources over finite alphabets. The TS code assigns sequences ordered based on their type class sizes to binary strings ordered lexicographically.

Universal F-V coding problem for the class of first-order stationary, irreducible and aperiodic Markov sources is first considered. Third-order coding rate of the TS code for the Markov class is derived. A converse on the third-order coding rate for the general class of F-V codes is presented which shows the optimality of the TS code for such Markov sources.

This type class approach is then generalized for compression of the parametric sources. A natural scheme is to define two sequences to be in the same type class if and only if they are equiprobable under any model in the parametric class. This natural approach, however, is shown to be suboptimal. A variation of the Type Size code is introduced, where type classes are defined based on neighborhoods of minimal sufficient statistics. Asymptotics of the overflow rate of this variation is derived and a converse result establishes its optimality up to the third-order term. These results are derived for parametric families of i.i.d. sources as well as Markov sources.

Finally, universal V-F length coding of the class of parametric sources is considered in the short blocklengths regime. The proposed dictionary which is used to parse the source output stream, consists of sequences in the boundaries of transition from low to high quantized type complexity, hence the name Type Complexity (TC) code. For large enough dictionary, the $\epsilon$-coding rate of the TC code is derived and a converse result is derived showing its optimality up to the third-order term.
ContributorsIri, Nematollah (Author) / Kosut, Oliver (Thesis advisor) / Bliss, Daniel (Committee member) / Sankar, Lalitha (Committee member) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
Cognitive radio (CR) and device-to-device (D2D) systems are two promising dynamic spectrum access schemes in wireless communication systems to provide improved quality-of-service, and efficient spectrum utilization. This dissertation shows that both CR and D2D systems benefit from properly designed cooperation scheme.

In underlay CR systems, where secondary users (SUs)

Cognitive radio (CR) and device-to-device (D2D) systems are two promising dynamic spectrum access schemes in wireless communication systems to provide improved quality-of-service, and efficient spectrum utilization. This dissertation shows that both CR and D2D systems benefit from properly designed cooperation scheme.

In underlay CR systems, where secondary users (SUs) transmit simultaneously with primary users (PUs), reliable communication is by all means guaranteed for PUs, which likely deteriorates SUs’ performance. To overcome this issue, cooperation exclusively among SUs is achieved through multi-user diversity (MUD), where each SU is subject to an instantaneous interference constraint at the primary receiver. Therefore, the active number of SUs satisfying this constraint is random. Under different user distributions with the same mean number of SUs, the stochastic ordering of SU performance metrics including bit error rate (BER), outage probability, and ergodic capacity are made possible even without observing closed form expressions. Furthermore, a cooperation is assumed between primary and secondary networks, where those SUs exceeding the interference constraint facilitate PU’s transmission by relaying its signal. A fundamental performance trade-off between primary and secondary networks is observed, and it is illustrated that the proposed scheme outperforms non-cooperative underlay CR systems in the sense of system overall BER and sum achievable rate.

Similar to conventional cellular networks, CR systems suffer from an overloaded receiver having to manage signals from a large number of users. To address this issue, D2D communications has been proposed, where direct transmission links are established between users in close proximity to offload the system traffic. Several new cooperative spectrum access policies are proposed allowing coexistence of multiple D2D pairs in order to improve the spectral efficiency. Despite the additional interference, it is shown that both the cellular user’s (CU) and the individual D2D user's achievable rates can be improved simultaneously when the number of D2D pairs is below a certain threshold, resulting in a significant multiplexing gain in the sense of D2D sum rate. This threshold is quantified for different policies using second order approximations for the average achievable rates for both the CU and the individual D2D user.
ContributorsZeng, Ruochen (Author) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Thesis advisor) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Committee member) / Bliss, Daniel (Committee member) / Kosut, Oliver (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
Aortic aneurysms and dissections are life threatening conditions addressed by replacing damaged sections of the aorta. Blood circulation must be halted to facilitate repairs. Ischemia places the body, especially the brain, at risk of damage. Deep hypothermia circulatory arrest (DHCA) is employed to protect patients and provide time for surgeons

Aortic aneurysms and dissections are life threatening conditions addressed by replacing damaged sections of the aorta. Blood circulation must be halted to facilitate repairs. Ischemia places the body, especially the brain, at risk of damage. Deep hypothermia circulatory arrest (DHCA) is employed to protect patients and provide time for surgeons to complete repairs on the basis that reducing body temperature suppresses the metabolic rate. Supplementary surgical techniques can be employed to reinforce the brain's protection and increase the duration circulation can be suspended. Even then, protection is not completely guaranteed though. A medical condition that can arise early in recovery is postoperative delirium, which is correlated with poor long term outcome. This study develops a methodology to intraoperatively monitor neurophysiology through electroencephalography (EEG) and anticipate postoperative delirium. The earliest opportunity to detect occurrences of complications through EEG is immediately following DHCA during warming. The first observable electrophysiological activity after being completely suppressed is a phenomenon known as burst suppression, which is related to the brain's metabolic state and recovery of nominal neurological function. A metric termed burst suppression duty cycle (BSDC) is developed to characterize the changing electrophysiological dynamics. Predictions of postoperative delirium incidences are made by identifying deviations in the way these dynamics evolve. Sixteen cases are examined in this study. Accurate predictions can be made, where on average 89.74% of cases are correctly classified when burst suppression concludes and 78.10% when burst suppression begins. The best case receiver operating characteristic curve has an area under its convex hull of 0.8988, whereas the worst case area under the hull is 0.7889. These results demonstrate the feasibility of monitoring BSDC to anticipate postoperative delirium during burst suppression. They also motivate a further analysis on identifying footprints of causal mechanisms of neural injury within BSDC. Being able to raise warning signs of postoperative delirium early provides an opportunity to intervene and potentially avert neurological complications. Doing so would improve the success rate and quality of life after surgery.
ContributorsMa, Owen (Author) / Bliss, Daniel W (Thesis advisor) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Kosut, Oliver (Committee member) / Brewer, Gene (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
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Description
Modern digital applications have significantly increased the leakage of private and sensitive personal data. While worst-case measures of leakage such as Differential Privacy (DP) provide the strongest guarantees, when utility matters, average-case information-theoretic measures can be more relevant. However, most such information-theoretic measures do not have clear operational meanings. This

Modern digital applications have significantly increased the leakage of private and sensitive personal data. While worst-case measures of leakage such as Differential Privacy (DP) provide the strongest guarantees, when utility matters, average-case information-theoretic measures can be more relevant. However, most such information-theoretic measures do not have clear operational meanings. This dissertation addresses this challenge.

This work introduces a tunable leakage measure called maximal $\alpha$-leakage which quantifies the maximal gain of an adversary in inferring any function of a data set. The inferential capability of the adversary is modeled by a class of loss functions, namely, $\alpha$-loss. The choice of $\alpha$ determines specific adversarial actions ranging from refining a belief for $\alpha =1$ to guessing the best posterior for $\alpha = \infty$, and for the two specific values maximal $\alpha$-leakage simplifies to mutual information and maximal leakage, respectively. Maximal $\alpha$-leakage is proved to have a composition property and be robust to side information.

There is a fundamental disjoint between theoretical measures of information leakages and their applications in practice. This issue is addressed in the second part of this dissertation by proposing a data-driven framework for learning Censored and Fair Universal Representations (CFUR) of data. This framework is formulated as a constrained minimax optimization of the expected $\alpha$-loss where the constraint ensures a measure of the usefulness of the representation. The performance of the CFUR framework with $\alpha=1$ is evaluated on publicly accessible data sets; it is shown that multiple sensitive features can be effectively censored to achieve group fairness via demographic parity while ensuring accuracy for several \textit{a priori} unknown downstream tasks.

Finally, focusing on worst-case measures, novel information-theoretic tools are used to refine the existing relationship between two such measures, $(\epsilon,\delta)$-DP and R\'enyi-DP. Applying these tools to the moments accountant framework, one can track the privacy guarantee achieved by adding Gaussian noise to Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithms. Relative to state-of-the-art, for the same privacy budget, this method allows about 100 more SGD rounds for training deep learning models.
ContributorsLiao, Jiachun (Author) / Sankar, Lalitha (Thesis advisor) / Kosut, Oliver (Committee member) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Dasarathy, Gautam (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
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Description
Reliable operation of modern power systems is ensured by an intelligent cyber layer that monitors and controls the physical system. The data collection and transmission is achieved by the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system, and data processing is performed by the energy management system (EMS). In the recent

Reliable operation of modern power systems is ensured by an intelligent cyber layer that monitors and controls the physical system. The data collection and transmission is achieved by the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system, and data processing is performed by the energy management system (EMS). In the recent decades, the development of phasor measurement units (PMUs) enables wide area real-time monitoring and control. However, both SCADA-based and PMU-based cyber layers are prone to cyber attacks that can impact system operation and lead to severe physical consequences.

This dissertation studies false data injection (FDI) attacks that are unobservable to bad data detectors (BDD). Prior work has shown that an attacker-defender bi-level linear program (ADBLP) can be used to determine the worst-case consequences of FDI attacks aiming to maximize the physical power flow on a target line. However, the results were only demonstrated on small systems assuming that they are operated with DC optimal power flow (OPF). This dissertation is divided into four parts to thoroughly understand the consequences of these attacks as well as develop countermeasures.

The first part focuses on evaluating the vulnerability of large-scale power systems to FDI attacks. The solution technique introduced in prior work to solve the ADBLP is intractable on large-scale systems due to the large number of binary variables. Four new computationally efficient algorithms are presented to solve this problem.

The second part studies vulnerability of N-1 reliable power systems operated by state-of-the-art EMSs commonly used in practice, specifically real-time contingency analysis (RTCA), and security-constrained economic dispatch (SCED). An ADBLP is formulated with detailed assumptions on attacker's knowledge and system operations.

The third part considers FDI attacks on PMU measurements that have strong temporal correlations due to high data rate. It is shown that predictive filters can detect suddenly injected attacks, but not gradually ramping attacks.

The last part proposes a machine learning-based attack detection framework consists of a support vector regression (SVR) load predictor that predicts loads by exploiting both spatial and temporal correlations, and a subsequent support vector machine (SVM) attack detector to determine the existence of attacks.
ContributorsChu, Zhigang (Author) / Kosut, Oliver (Thesis advisor) / Sankar, Lalitha (Committee member) / Scaglione, Anna (Committee member) / Pal, Anamitra (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
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Description
The open nature of the wireless communication medium makes it inherently vulnerable to an active attack, wherein a malicious adversary (or jammer) transmits into the medium to disrupt the operation of the legitimate users. Therefore, developing techniques to manage the presence of a jammer and to characterize the effect of

The open nature of the wireless communication medium makes it inherently vulnerable to an active attack, wherein a malicious adversary (or jammer) transmits into the medium to disrupt the operation of the legitimate users. Therefore, developing techniques to manage the presence of a jammer and to characterize the effect of an attacker on the fundamental limits of wireless communication networks is important. This dissertation studies various Gaussian communication networks in the presence of such an adversarial jammer.

First of all, a standard Gaussian channel is considered in the presence of a jammer, known as a Gaussian arbitrarily-varying channel, but with list-decoding at the receiver. The receiver decodes a list of messages, instead of only one message, with the goal of the correct message being an element of the list. The capacity is characterized, and it is shown that under some transmitter's power constraints the adversary is able to suspend the communication between the legitimate users and make the capacity zero.

Next, generalized packing lemmas are introduced for Gaussian adversarial channels to achieve the capacity bounds for three Gaussian multi-user channels in the presence of adversarial jammers. Inner and outer bounds on the capacity regions of Gaussian multiple-access channels, Gaussian broadcast channels, and Gaussian interference channels are derived in the presence of malicious jammers. For the Gaussian multiple-access channels with jammer, the capacity bounds coincide. In this dissertation, the adversaries can send any arbitrary signals to the channel while none of the transmitter and the receiver knows the adversarial signals' distribution.

Finally, the capacity of the standard point-to-point Gaussian fading channel in the presence of one jammer is investigated under multiple scenarios of channel state information availability, which is the knowledge of exact fading coefficients. The channel state information is always partially or fully known at the receiver to decode the message while the transmitter or the adversary may or may not have access to this information. Here, the adversary model is the same as the previous cases with no knowledge about the user's transmitted signal except possibly the knowledge of the fading path.
ContributorsHosseinigoki, Fatemeh (Author) / Kosut, Oliver (Thesis advisor) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Sankar, Lalitha (Committee member) / Bliss, Daniel (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019