Curriculum Computer Science and Innovation for Societal Challenges, XXXVII series  Grant sponsor Omitech SRL Supervisor s Mauro Conti Co-Supervisor s Anna Spagnolli Contact denis.donadel@studenti.unipd.it

Project description

Cyber-Physical Systems are revolutionizing our world by exploiting a profound interconnection between the physical world (e.g., through sensors and actuators) with the virtual world of information technology. Examples of Cyber-Physical Systems are everywhere: from control systems in nuclear facilities to smart lights in our homes. Unfortunately, the uncontrolled spread of these systems with their highly interconnected design inevitably opens new dangerous vulnerability surfaces, which malicious actors can exploit to compromise the devices, threatening users' safety. My Ph.D. research project aims at securing vehicles and social robots, two critical categories of Cyber-Physical Systems that are directly in contact with people every day. Vehicles contain a lot of lines of code, many connections with other systems (e.g., V2X), and several computational units employed to control every component, from infotainment systems to the engine. Social robots represent a novel critical type of Cyber-Physical System used to help customers in commercial facilities (e.g., in hotels) and support users in need (e.g., in hospitals). Like vehicles, these robots contain many different sensors and computational blocks that an attacker can exploit for evil purposes. I plan to develop ad-hoc techniques to protect these systems against threats coming from the outside through the connections available on them (e.g., Bluetooth, 5G) and to secure the communication between their internal components.