CSE Dept is celebrating its 2nd CSE Day on 22 October 2016

The Deptartment of CSE at IIT Hyderabad is celebrating its 2nd Departmental Day on 22nd October 2016, to foster interaction among students, faculty and industry. The event will be held in Upper Deck of Dining Hall (UDH), IIT Hyderebad campus. The event consists of many exciting interactive and fun programmes, such as invited talks, R&D showcase, panel discussion, cultural programmes, etc. Students would be showcasing the state-of-the-art research works carried out in the department. You can find the flyer here.

Schedule

15:00 Welcome Address
15:10 Report on Department
15:20 Invited Talks
16:00 Panel Discussions
16:45 Tea Break
17:00 Industry Exhibits, R&D Showcase
17:45 Cultural and Interactive Events
19:15 Prize Distribution
19:30 Dinner

Invited Speakers

Prof. C. Pandu Rangan (Indian Institute of Technology, Madras)

Topic: Shannon perfect secrecy and birth of modern cryptography

Bio: Prof. Chandrasekharan Pandu Rangan (C. Pandu Rangan) is a senior professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM), India, where he has been working since 1982. His primary research is in the design of pragmatic algorithms. His areas of interest are Cryptography, Data Structures and Algorithms, Graph Algorithms, VLSI, Parallel and Distributed Algorithms, and Computational Geometry.

A distinguished alumnus of University of Madras, Pandu Rangan received his PhD in Applied Mathematics from the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, India. He has worked as the Head of the Department of IIT Madras, IIT Hyderabad and ISI Chennai. He has guided over 80 Master students and 12 PhD students.

He has published over 200 papers in various reputed journals and conferences. He serves on the editorial board of LNCS, a lecture notes series published by Springer Verlag, Germany. He has handled collaborative projects with international partners under Indo-German, Indo-French, and Indo-Israel grants. He is a fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineers.

Prof. Sandeep K. Shukla (Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur)

Topic: Cyber Security of Critical Infrastructures: A Case for a Schizoid Design Approach

Abstract: In the past, the design of cyber physical systems required a model based engineering approach, where as a first step of the design process – a physics based mathematical model of the physical system, and a control theoretic model of the control system – were put together in a formal or semi-formal framework. The designers would start from an abstract model, and refine it down to an implementation model in several steps, either formally or informally. The implementation model is then validated for functional correctness, performance, real-time requirements etc. Functional Safety, robustness to input assumptions, reliability under fault assumptions, and resilience to unknown adversities were considered as good design goals. With the increasing networked distributed control of large and geographically distributed critical infrastructures such as smart grid, smart transportation systems, air traffic control system etc. – the exposure to cyber-attacks ushered in by the IP-convergence – the design goals must consider cyber-security and cyber defense as first class design objectives. However, in order to do so, designers have to don a dual personality – while designing for robustness, reliability, functional safety – a model driven engineering approach would work – whereas for designing for cyber-security and defense, the designer has to step into the shoes of a malicious attacker. For example, one has to consider the various observation or sampling points of the system (e.g. sensors to read or sample the physical environment), and think how an attacker might compromise the unobservability of those points without authentication, and what knowledge of the system dynamics or the control mechanism of the system might be actually reconstructed by the attacker.. One also has to consider the actuation points of the system, and ponder the least number of such actuation points the attacker has to take over in order to disrupt the dynamics of the system enough to create considerable damage. One has to envision how to obfuscate the dynamics of the system even when certain sensing or actuation points are compromised. Also, it is known that a large percentage of attacks are induced by inside attackers. Thus perimeter defense alone cannot defend the system. In such cases, the question that one is confronted with is whether there is enough indication of an ongoing attack in the dynamics of the system itself. This approach to viewing the system from an adversarial position requires one to topple the design paradigm over its head, and we will need to build models from data, and not just generate data from models. The designer has to observe a system in action – even through partial observations, and construct a model close enough to the real system model – and then use the partial access to create damages to the because the approximate model allows her to do so. Almost like a schizophrenic duality, the engineer also has to wear the designers hat, and consider a game in which the observations are obfuscated enough to render it impossible for an attacker to build any useful model to induce clever attacks. The designer has to worry if she can construct from unobfuscated observations a dynamics quickly enough so that the difference between the expected dynamics and the real dynamics can trigger alarms to alert the system administrators. In this talk, while discussing this view of system design, we will also talk about VSCADA – a virtual distributed SCADA lab we created for modeling SCADA systems for critical infrastructures, and how to use such a virtual lab completely implemented in simulation – to achieve the cyber security and cyber defense objectives of critical infrastructures – through attack injections, attack detection, and experiments on new defense mechanisms.

Bio: Professor Sandeep K. Shukla received his bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering at Jadavpur University, Kolkata in 1991, his Masters and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Albany, NY, USA in 1995 and 1997 respectively. He worked as a scientist at the GTE labs on telecommunications network management, distributed object technology, and event correlation technologies 1997-1999. Between 1999 and 2001, he worked at the Intel Corporation on the formal verification of the ITANIUM processor, and on system level design languages. 2001-2002, he was a research faculty at the University of California at Irvine working on embedded system design. From 2002 till 2015, he has been an assistant, associate, and full professor at Virginia Tech, USA. He co-founded the Center for Embedded Systems for Critical Applications (CESCA) in 2007, and has been a director of the center between 2010 and 2012. The center grew to 9 tenure-track faculty, 60 graduate students and number of research faculty, and crossed the 2M dollar/year expenditure threshold during his directorship. Since 2012, he has been focusing on cyber-security of critical infrastructures. He received the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from the White House in 2004, Frederich Wilhelm Bessel Award in 2008 from the Humboldt Foundation, Germany, ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2013, and IEEE Fellow in 2014. He is an ACM Distinguished Speaker and served as an IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitor between 2008 and 2012. He is currently the editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Embedded Systems, Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems. In the past, he has been associate editors for IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, IEEE Design & Test, IEEE Embedded Systems Letters, and many other journals. He has guest-edited more than 15 special issues for various IEEE and ACM journals. He has written or edited 9 books, published over 200 journal and conference papers. He graduated 12 PhDs, and directed five post-doctoral scholars before joining IIT Kanpur in 2015. His group developed a number of co-simulation tools for data-communication enabled smart-grid, and SCADA system for industrial automation for the purpose of cyber-security threat modeling, simulation of cyber-attacks, and mitigation experimentation. He is also an expert in formal methods, formal verification, and program synthesis which he uses for cyber-security work – such as software vulnerability detection. His main focus currently is cyber-security of cyber-physical systems, in particular, application of machine learning, and formal analysis to discover ways to distinguish physical dynamics variations due to stochastic variations, and cyber-attack induced variations.

Panel Discussion

Topic: Promoting a healthy programming culture in the university setting

Panel Members:

Prof. C. Pandu Rangan (IIT Madras)
Prof. Sandeep K. Shukla (IIT Kanpur)
Dr. Kaushik Saha (Samsung Research India, Delhi)
M/s Srilatha Rayasam (Microsoft, Hyderabad)
Prof. Subrahmanyam Kalyanasundaram (IIT Hyderabad, Panel moderator)

Dates:
Saturday, October 22, 2016 - 15:00 to 19:30