Please find below information about the seventh seminar of the DEWS Colloquia (https://dews.univaq.it/index.php?id=4059 ) organized by the Center of Excellence for Research DEWS (https://dews.univaq.it/). In order not to forget the opportunity, add this event to your calendar

Speaker: Karen Rudie (Queen’s University, Canada)

Title: How Discrete-Event Systems Can Keep Secrets Secret

Abstract: The control theory of discrete-event systems (DESs) is a modeling framework for capturing the ordering of events or actions. Discrete-event systems modeling can be complementary to traditional continuous-time systems modeling or can be used alongside or in concert with continuous-time modeling in hybrid systems. Since decision-making is tantamount to prescribing which actions should or should not happen or which actions should happen before others, the body of work in DES theory is well-positioned to allow us to tackle security problems in cyber-physical systems. In this talk we present different approaches in DES control theory that address various problems in the security of systems and networks. In particular, we examine the notion of opacity, which is the property of ensuring that secret states or secret sequences of events are not discernible from non-secret states or events to a hostile agent. We also look at cases where systems are attacked by adversarial agents that manipulate sensor outputs (i.e., event occurrences generated by a plant) so that a supervisor (i.e., a DES controller) is fooled into thinking the system is in some state that it is not in. We discuss the challenges of modeling security and secrecy problems using discrete-event systems.

Bio: Karen Rudie is a Professor at Queen’s University (Canada) in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, with a cross-appointment to the School of Computing. She received her Ph.D. in 1992 from the University of Toronto, in the Systems Control Group, under the supervision of W. Murray Wonham. In 1992-93 she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications, Minnesota. From 2004-2006 she was an IEEE Control Systems Society Distinguished Lecturer. She has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Discrete Event Dynamic Systems (since 2000), where she is currently a Department Editor, and has served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology (2015-2020), IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (1996-1999), and IEEE Control Systems Magazine (2003). She is a Fellow of the IEEE. Her research focuses on the control of discrete-event systems.