| Title | : | Cybersecurity for Critical Energy Infrastructures in the AI Age |
| Speaker | : | Manimaran Govindarasu (Iowa State University) |
| Details | : | Tue, 11 Mar, 2025 10:00 AM @ SSB 233 |
| Abstract: | : | Power grid is a complex critical infrastructure system that forms the lifeline of our modern society. Reliable, secure, and resilient operation of critical energy infrastructures is of paramount importance to national security and economic wellbeing. In recent years, there has been a growing trend of cyber threats/attacks, both in numbers and sophistication, targeting critical infrastructure systems around the globe (e.g., Stuxnet, Ukraine power grid attacks, and Colonial Pipeline attack). This evolving cyber threat landscape, coupled with the leveraging of AI tools by the adversaries, underscores the importance and urgency for Cyber Physical System (CPS) security solutions that go beyond the traditional IT cybersecurity by leveraging grid’s CPS properties and harnessing the power of AI models/tools to be able to deter, prevent, detect, mitigate, and be resilient against stealthy cyber attacks. This talk will present an overview of cybersecurity threats to critical energy infrastructures, then it will present a holistic life-cycle model for CPS security with some illustrative solutions for attack prevention, detection, and mitigation. Then, it will briefly discuss the importance of CPS security testbeds for attack-defense evaluations and finally will conclude with some future research directions.
Bio: Manimaran Govindarasu is on the faculty of Iowa State University since 1999, and he currently holds the titles of Anson Marston Distinguished Professor in Engineering and Harpole Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Prior to joining Iowa State, he received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (Chennai). His research experience includes Cybersecurity for the Smart Grid and Critical Infrastructures, and Real-time Systems and Networks. He has co-authored over 300 peer-reviewed research publications, received multiple conference best paper awards, presented several dozen conference invited talks, tutorials, and industry short-courses, hands-on training sessions, and mentored over 50 graduate students for their dissertation/thesis research. He is currently serving as the Chair of Cybersecurity Working Group for Power Grid in IEEE Power & Energy Society and has served as an Associate Editor and guest co-editor for several flagship IEEE publications. He currently leads a US DOE funded multi-university research center, with industry and national partners, focusing on cybersecurity and resiliency for renewable energy infrastructures. His research is supported over the years by US NSF, DOE, DHS, and DOD. He is an ABET Program Evaluator and a Fellow of the IEEE. |
