Workshop report will be posted soon, before the end of February 2010.

Workshop Location: University of Washington

A 1.5 day workshop on the emerging and critical problem of cyber-physical systems security in network-centric warfare and MANETs is being organized under the sponsorship of the Army Research Office (ARO). The workshop will take place 26-27 August 2009 at the University of Washington, Seattle and is hosted by the Department of Electrical Engineering.

Workshop Objective: The main motivation for this workshop is to understand the challenges, research space that merges networking, control and security and how that can be utilized to improve the performance and security of Network-Centric systems with human-in-the-loop for the U.S. Army.

A network-centric approach to model, detect, isolate and mitigate the vulnerabilities and attacks is less understood yet critical problem in mobile tactical networks. However, recently it has become evident that the future combat force will be highly relying on advanced sensors, with almost a personal sensor web associated with each soldier. These will include miniature UAVs, body sensor networks, deployed and unattended sensor networks.

An emerging new paradigm is the cyber physical systems view that indicates such mobile tactical networks must jointly consider control, communication, networking and security to provide new design approaches with significantly improved performance in the battlefield in terms of (a) robustness and resiliency, (b) stability under dynamics and attacks, (c) provide better monitoring, situation awareness and easy to merge or split into coalitions of desirable size. While cyber physical systems can allow joint consideration of control, communication, networking and security, at present our understanding of such systems is limited.

The major goal of this workshop is to bring together the experts from academia, DoD and industry, in the areas of control, networking, communication and security, to present and discuss the use of CPS framework for security of Army Tactical and operational networks. The workshop will focus on defining the terms, identifying research topics and challenges, and delineating the short, medium and long term research agenda for CPS security for the Army in the context of Future Combat Systems (FCS), as well as identifying a list of major research areas that must be investigated to model, detect and defend threats using CPS framework for FCS. ARO and Army in general will significantly benefit from research and understanding in this area.

How to attend, and what to submit: Participation in this workshop is by invitation only. If you are interested in attending and presenting, please send your name, contact information, title of the talk and an abstract not to exceed one page, indicating the relevance and your background, to rp3@u.washington.edu