Biography

Bharadwaj Satchidanandan is a fourth-year graduate student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering
department at Texas A&M University, College Station. Satchidanandan finished his master's degree in
Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He was an intern at Intel Labs in
Santa Clara, CA. His work focused on interference cancellation algorithms for next-generation wireless
networks. He also interned at National Instruments in Austin, TX. His focus was on medium access
control for millimeter-wave WLANs. As stated in his biography, his interests are cyber-physical systems,
power systems, security, database privacy, communications, control, and signal processing.
 Summary

 The seminar Security of Cyber-Physical Systems showed the problem of hardware security
systems. In practice, actuators and sensors are used to control a system over a network. One or
some of those devices could be dysfunctional and become “malicious”. For example, a malicious
sensor may feedback wrong information to the server or may not response to the request from
the server. It could report distorted measurements to the controller, thereby causing bad
performance of the whole system.
 The seminar follows by the topic: problem caused by malware: A dangerous malware affected a
nuclear facility in Iran. It was spread by vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows.
 In a linear system, sensors and actuator are nodes. Affected by weather or attacked from
outside, these nodes could become malicious. Only malicious nodes know which nodes are
dysfunctional. The remaining nodes which operate normal called honest nodes. These honest
nodes don’t know what nodes are malicious. However, we could use those honest nodes to
detect bad nodes. This technique called Dynamic Watermarking.
 By using Gaussian random interference, the system creates an excitation which is a random
variable. Actuators know the excitation of the system. Malicious nodes send malicious
information including an incorrect excitation to the actuators. Those actuators could check to
see if the excitation is matched with the system. If not, they would feedback to the system, then
system would cease all activities of bad nodes.
 The meaning of the Water Marking means the excitation is marked and can be easily recognized.
It was created by the system and only system can replace a new excitation. This excitation was
initiated by a math model of Gaussian random variable. If one of the sensor goes bad, it does
not have the original mark.
 The group of Bharadwaj Satchidanandan created a system of water marking on autonomous
cars. One of the cars had a bad sensor causing it chasing another car. By applying water marking,
the car with bad sensor stopped once its system recognized the excitation was wrong from the
sensor.
Ideas and recommendations
 The water marking is not a new idea in digital world but applying it to hardware world is a
brand-new idea. This also could apply to the internet of things where security is a major
concern.
 One rising question is the cost. The devices including sensors and actuators normally do their
own duties which are sending measurements and controlling movements. However, with water
marking, they are also encrypting and decrypting devices. In other words, we add up functions
and duties to them. The cost for adding more components for their functionalities could rise.