ADSC researcher Deming Chen, along with his graduate students and colleagues from Intel and Ohio State University, recently received the William J. McCalla Best Paper Award at the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design. Their paper looks at creating low energy Systems-on-Chips (SoCs) in an automated and efficient manner.

ICCAD is one of the top conferences in the computer aided design field, where researchers are developing software to help automate design processes for electronic circuits, and the paper was voted as the best paper out of 14 candidates, which were selected from 381 submitted papers.

Chen’s team includes three Illinois electrical and computer engineering graduate students, Wei Zuo, Warren Kemmerer and Jong Bin Lim, as well as Louis-Noël Pouchet, a research assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Ohio State University, and Andrey Ayupov, Taemin Kim and Kyungtae Han from Intel.

As mobile technology is becoming the norm, researchers are looking at ways to save battery power in the devices. Chen and his team have proposed an automated design process that targets energy smart SoC designs to create low energy mobile devices that use SoCs for computing and control.

“Our goal is to minimize the energy consumption up to 10x and improve the design productivity at the same time,” said Chen, a member of Illinois’ electrical and computer engineering faculty. “To do that, we propose efficient and automated hardware and software design at the same time to create a complete system on one chip.”

Currently, there are many manual aspects to the design process and, according to Chen, the design procedures are difficult and labor-intensive. This makes for a lengthy design process and designers end up settling for suboptimal solutions in order to save time. Additionally, the available solutions don’t offer very effective tradeoff options in regards to power versus latency, which is how long it will take to finish a function.

To deal with these issues, the researchers’ unique process generates two different versions of SystemC code – one that creates high level accurate models and another that enables high level synthesis solutions to generate hardware automatically.

The researchers use the SystemC code generation engine, which was primarily developed by Zuo, along with a compilation framework called polyhedral modeling that was developed by Pouchet, to create an analytical model accurately and automatically. This, in turn, speeds up the customized hardware design in the SoC, as well as provides better solutions than previously available.

“The polyhedral model-based compilation framework is very powerful and can provide all kinds of different optimization solutions,” Zuo said. “It also helps us to generate different structures from the source code and can provide important analysis information.”

The framework will help designers choose the optimal balance between latency and power.

“For any given power, we’re looking for the best latency you can get, and for a given latency, we want to know the best power you can achieve,” Kemmerer said. “Ultimately, we prune away anything that is inferior and are left with a curve of optimal points that a designer can then choose from depending on what power or latency they want.”

Based on the analytical model they developed, the researchers can capture the large design space efficiently to then perform design space exploration.

“There are so many options for designing the hardware, so we use our constructed analytical model to explore the options to generate the best tradeoff between latency and power,” Chen said.

This solution can be used by engineers needing to design a lower power SoC quickly. Preliminary results show that their solution is, on average, 2000x faster than a baseline method and allows for rapid customized hardware design, which can deliver high performance while consuming much less power.

“Generating this dedicated hardware for SoC is critical, and we want to produce it quickly and optimally, so engineers can achieve their design goals and a device can reach the market in a timely fashion,” Chen said.

An ADSC research team ranked in the top 3 in a recent Tech Challenge, hosted by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA). The competition focused on video analytics and asked teams to develop a solution to anonymize videos being used for crowd sensing and traffic monitoring in real time.

“Detecting humans in a crowded scene has been a very challenging computer vision task for a long time,” ADSC Adjunct Research Scientist Bingbing Ni said. “The current performance is still not mature. We wanted to create a novel human detection system that has high accuracy and high reliability and is close to real deployment.”

The competition included two stages where participants created algorithms to detect and blur out human faces appearing in public surveillance videos around Singapore. The videos in stage two were more challenging to anonymize, as there were many more people and partially hidden faces compared to stage one. IDA hosted the challenge to encourage Singapore researchers to discover improved video analytics techniques in order to gain more meaningful insights from video data.

“One of the difficulties of this challenge was that the quality of the videos was so terrible,” ADSC Software Engineer Tan-Loc Truong said. “The color, illumination condition and the number of people fluctuated in an unpredictable way. This meant that in order to be able to detect all the faces, our algorithm had to be robust enough to address all of these conditions.”

ADSC’s team also included Research Scientist Jiwen Lu, former intern Duyen Phuc Nguyen and Illinois Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Pierre Moulin. The group’s research at ADSC focuses on designing architecture for multisensory, multimodal analytics and applying it to audiovisual surveillance and assisted living. The algorithms they use to detect rigid objects in digital images were useful in helping develop the algorithms for the IDA Challenge.

Participants’ algorithms were evaluated on their ability to identify objects in the video, how accurate their algorithm was and how fast the algorithm performed. ADSC’s team was second in recall and first in precision and timing in stage one and third overall in stage 2. The team received S$3,000 for their stage one 2nd place finish.

To solve many problems in life, one must often first think like the opposition, anticipate their moves, and then create a strategy to defend against them. That’s exactly what cybersecurity researchers at ADSC are doing.

ADSC Senior Research Scientist Rui Tan is working to solve many problems related to cybersecurity and the smart grid, and his first step in developing a solution is to think like the attacker. In the project, “Towards a Resilient Smart Power Grid: A Testbed for Design, Analysis and Validation of Power Grid Systems,” he focuses on designing and testing technologies to create more resilient power systems. At its core, the project looks at understanding the challenges in securing the smart grid and then designing measures to prevent against potential attacks.

Tan is working with a broad group of researchers, including Illinois Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Ravishankar Iyer, Illinois Principal Research Scientist Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, ADSC Cybersecurity Program Director David Yau, ADSC research engineer Ziyi Wang, ADSC postdoctoral fellows Xinshu Dong and Uttam Ghosh, former ADSC research engineers Hoang Hai Nguyen ​and Varun Badrinath Krishna, Illinois PhD student Hui Lin, and Nanyang Technological University Professor Hoay Beng Gooi, to help solve these problems.

One important aspect of securing the smart grid is determining how an attacker can destabilize grid control systems and demand response systems, such as real-time pricing for utility customers.

With real-time pricing, consumers are provided the actual cost of electricity at any given time, a concept that is gaining popularity in the United States and Singapore. For example, utility companies in Illinois, such as ComEd and Ameren Illinois, are now legally required to provide a real-time pricing option to customers. There is also a new pilot project in Singapore that deploys an advanced metering infrastructure, which would support the implementation of real-time pricing in homes. While customers could benefit from cheaper electric bills, these advances require modern communication infrastructures reaching each customer, and those infrastructures are susceptible to cyber attacks.

One way Tan and his team seek to understand the smart grid is to consider how an outside attacker would try to destabilize the control system, which could affect energy transmission. Recently, Tan, along with Krishna, Yau and Kalbarczyk, studied how attacks could affect real-time pricing systems under a general control-theoretic formulation in the smart grid.

“The attacker may hack into the backbone communication system and change the price signals disseminated to the customers’ smart meters,” Tan said.

Additionally, an attacker can also take indirect approaches that are less labor intensive, such as compromising clock synchronization services in the real-time pricing system, which could lead to information delivery delay.

The team focused on analyzing the stability of the real-time pricing market when price information transmitted over communications networks is compromised.

“For example, we can show that if the pricing system can make sure that over half of their customers receive the correct price information in real-time, it doesn’t matter how much price information delivery delay is introduced by the attacker for the rest of the customers. The market is always stable if half receive the correct information,” Tan said.

Tan and his team also studied how attackers could affect power grid frequency by compromising sensor readings.

“The grid frequency is very sensitive,” Tan said. “If you can move the frequency by just three Hz, the system can run into a serious situation. The generator would be tripped, transformers could be destroyed and it could cause massive blackouts.”

The team developed algorithms from the perspective of the attacker to find the most effective way to launch an attack. Based on those results, they were able to develop a fast detection algorithm that allows the defenders to recognize the attacks that inject false readings into the system and identify when the system frequency deviates from normal values.

The solution is unique because it assumes a strong threat model, meaning the attacker knows the details of the grid very well, as opposed to injecting random errors into the system with no real knowledge of the system. In addition, the team worked to precisely quantify the physical impact of the attack and analyze the maximum damage the attacker could do to the grid.

“New countermeasures with a good understanding about the physics of the grid must be developed to harden and secure the smart grid systems,” Tan said.

Currently, researchers are beginning work with software defined networking (SDN) for power grids. SDN is a method to make networks more agile and flexible, allowing for quick responses from a centralized console that controls many aspects of the network. While this technology has been applied in data centers, such as Google’s, Tan thinks they are among the pioneering groups to study how to apply SDN to cyber physical systems such as power grids.

“SDN’s unprecedented features provide new ways to achieve resilient smart grids,” Tan said. “However, it’s still unclear how to leverage these features to improve the functional performance and reliability and security of smart grid communications and how to manage its disadvantages, like single-point failure risk due to its centralized network control.”

The researchers, who have varied expertise in areas like control, networking and security, will work together to create a solution. The team is also developing a hardware testbed, composed of real SDN switches and different servers and hosts, which will form a network for smart grid resilience. They will use the testbed to validate their findings and solutions.

“The key feature of SDN is the centralized controller and because of that there is centralized risk,” Tan said. “If the controller is compromised and sends malicious messages, it could end badly for the system.”

The group will consider how to jointly control the physical and networking systems to balance the conflicting goals of functional performance with the reliability and security of smart grids.

ADSC Professor William H. Sanders has received the 2016 IEEE Technical Field Award, Innovation in Societal Infrastructure, for his revolutionary work concerning the cybersecurity of the power grid. The award recognizes Sanders’ work as some of the most significant in his field.

The award recognizes Sanders’s fundamental research in this area and its impact within industry and cites him for his “assessment-driven design of trustworthy cyber infrastructures for societal-scale systems.”

Sanders, a Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering and ECE department head, recognized and began to work on the power grid cyber security challenge much earlier than most researchers, around the turn of the century. Motivated by this realization, has worked in every part of the field, from the distribution-side, including smart meters, to long-haul transmission networks.

“It took some time to convince people that grid security and cyber security and resiliency was a serious challenge,” he said.

The real focus began in 2003, after the major blackout in the northeast showed people the fragility of the grid.

“That focused people’s attention on the need for trustworthy power grids – a realization that became even more important given the whole smart grid revolution that came later,” he said.

Sanders has made pioneering contributions to make sure the power grid is safe, secure, reliable, and available. He did so by developing tools and techniques to make the grid more resilient, and methods for quantitatively assessing its cyber security and resiliency.

In 2005, Sanders created TCIP, the Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for Power center, to combine computer security and power systems research as a unified front to address the problem. In 2009, this work continued through his leadership of TCIPG, a $18.4M DOE Office of Electricity Delivery & Energy Reliability and DHS Office of Science and Technology sponsored activity. He’s now co-PI of the Cyber Resilient Energy Delivery Consortium, a $28.1 million initiative the U.S. Department of Energy is funding.

Within these efforts, he co-created tools to protect the power grid against malicious attackers on computer systems, including Amilyzer, a smart meter intrusion detection system. In the U.S., these boxes monitor 70 million meters for suspicious activity. He is also the co-inventor of NP-View, software to test NERC-CIP compliance of process control networks, and co-founder of Network Perception, Inc., which further develops and markets that technology.

Sanders’ goal is to build resilient systems.

“Even if attacks are partially successful, or even if some failures occur, the system should detect those, and respond, recover, and continue to perform its function,” he said.

He said his work wouldn’t be possible without CSL Professors Peter W. Sauer and David M. Nicol, as well as the many others involved in TCIP and TCIPG. Nicol is the director of ITI.

“The reason I have been able to make such progress is really because of collaborations with a great group of people,” he said.

Despite everything Sanders has done for the field, he said there’s still more to do. The attackers continue to become more sophisticated, so the security system has to increase in scope, size, and ability.

“We need to up our game in regard to the protection, and response systems we provide,” Sanders said. “We need to continue to innovate.”

The U.S. Department of Energy has selected the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to lead a new five-year, $28.1USD million initiative that will develop cyber resilient energy delivery systems for the electric power and oil & gas industries. The DOE is contributing $22.5 million, with $5.6 million in recipient cost-share.

The Cyber Resilient Energy Delivery Consortium (CREDC), which consists of 11 universities and national laboratories, will focus on improving the resilience and security of the cyber networks that serve as the backbone of the infrastructure that delivers energy to the nation — known as energy delivery systems (EDS) — such as power grid and pipeline systems. ADSC researchers David M. Nicol and William H. Sanders are helping lead the effort.

The consortium includes researchers from Argonne National Laboratory, Arizona State University, Dartmouth College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oregon State University, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Rutgers University, Tennessee State University, the University of Houston, and Washington State University.

“Our consortium will focus on making energy delivery systems resilient to cyber-anomalies, whether accidental or from malicious intent,” said Nicol, director of the Information Trust Institute at Illinois, Franklin W. Woeltge Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and CREDC principal investigator. “The challenge is that increased efficiencies and capabilities in energy delivery rely on greater use of computers and communication networks, which simultaneously raises the potential for serious problems. We need to be able to integrate advanced cyber components with the assurance that we aren’t making systems more vulnerable.”

Cyber networks provide the framework for many important functions within energy delivery systems, from sending data between a smart meter and utility to controlling the flow of oil or gas in a pipeline. However, they are also vulnerable to disturbances. According to the ICS-CERT “Monitor,” a publication of the Department of Homeland Security, a third of the 245 reported cyber incidents in industrial control systems that happened in 2014 occurred in the energy sector.

CREDC will work to make these systems more secure and resilient. In the cyber world, “security” refers to the ability to keep data confidential and uncorrupted, while “resiliency” is the ability to withstand attacks, provide an acceptable level of service in the midst of an incident, and recover quickly following an attack.

Areas of focus will include cyber protection technologies; cyber monitoring, metrics, and event detection; risk assessment of EDS technology; data analytics for cyber event detection; resilient EDS architectures and networks; and the impact of disruptive technologies, such as the Internet of Things and cloud computing, on EDS resiliency.

In addition, the consortium will look at business aspects of cyber resiliency. A major impediment to more resilient systems is the cost of upgrading legacy equipment. Researchers will analyze the return on investment in new technology and design models that will help businesses choose the most cost-effective, high-impact solutions.

The goal, Nicol says, is to create a pipeline through which foundational research will lead to applied research and development, which in turn will result in technology that is effective and affordable and can be implemented quickly in the field. The consortium will collaborate with industry partners—ranging from Fortune 500 companies like Honeywell, to utilities such as Illinois-based Ameren—to accelerate the tech transfer process.

Illinois has deep roots in EDS resilience, particularly in the area of electric power. CREDC is a successor to two earlier initiatives:

  • Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid project, a $7.5 million initiative funded in 2005 by the National Science Foundation with support from the Department of Energy and Department of Homeland Security;
  • Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid (TCIPG) project, an $18.4 million initiative launched in 2009 by the DoE’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability with support from the DHS’s Science and Technology Directorate’s Cyber Security Division.

With CREDC, Illinois and its partner institutions will broaden the research scope to include the oil & gas industry as well. While both fields face similar problems from a technical perspective, the dynamics can play out in vastly different ways. An attack on the power grid can create a regional blackout in a matter of seconds, while pipeline incidents tend to be more localized, but with potentially far more devastating consequences.

“The challenges of the next five years are not fully understood,” said Carl Hauser, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Washington State. “CREDC is a long-term commitment by the Department of Energy to find the problems and solve them.”

Media Inquiries: Kim Gudeman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, kgudeman

ADSC researchers Varun Badrinath Krishna and Bill Sanders, along with University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign researcher Gabe Weaver, have received the best paper award for their work on smart meter security at the 12th International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of Systems. The conference was held Sept. 1-3 in Madrid.

QEST Program Committee chair Javier Campos and Varun Badrinath Krishna at QEST

Increasingly, electric utilities are deploying smart meters to improve power delivery service. However, these meters – which use Internet-based communications networks to report data — may be vulnerable to cyber attacks, whether the motive be pilfering electricity or destabilizing the power market. The paper, “PCA-Based Method for Detecting Integrity Attacks on Advanced Metering Infrastructure,” proposes combining two unsupervised learning methods in a unique way to help verify intrusion attempts.

It is believed to be the first time the two methods — called Principal Component Analysis and Density-based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise – have been combined and successfully applied in computer security and smart grid research.

“This is my first research paper as the first author,” said Krishna, a graduate student in electrical and computer engineering at Illinois and research affiliate at ADSC. “When the conference Program Committee chairs announced that we had won the Best Paper Award, I really froze in disbelief. When members of the Program Committee came to congratulate me, I told them that it must just be ‘beginner’s luck.’ But they said it was a really good paper and stood out on its merit, despite tough competition from many great researchers.”

Cyber intruders attack by compromising the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), a network of smart meters that measure electricity consumption. The authors propose to identify intrusion by leveraging a unique aspect of electricity consumption: its repetitive nature. For example, the consumption of a university lecture hall at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday is likely very similar to the level at 3 p.m. on previous Tuesdays.

In identifying intrusions, the model outperforms the “Average Detector” proposed in related work. Future work will focus on improving false positive results. For example, it is difficult to discern a malicious intrusion (someone stealing electricity) from a legitimate anomaly (someone traveling and not consuming much electricity at home).

The researchers conducted their work using a dataset of real smart-meter readings obtained from Ireland’s Commission for Energy Regulation. The paper was based on research funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Along with Krishna, Weaver, a research scientist in the Information Trust Institute, and Sanders, head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois, recently submitted a project proposal that was selected for funding by the Siebel Energy Institute. Read more about the project here.