Resilience meets secure networked control

(Resilienz für sichere vernetzte Regelungen)

Team

Chair for IT Security and Cryptography, University of Wuppertal

  • Tibor Jager
    Tibor Jager’s research addresses fundamental open research questions on real-world cryptography. He finished his PhD in 2011 at the Horst Görtz Institute of Ruhr-University Bochum, under the supervision of Prof. Jörg Schwenk. After a research stay at CWI Amsterdam and postdoc positions at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Ruhr-University Bochum, he was appointed Professor for IT Security at Paderborn University in 2016 and Professor of IT Security and Cryptography at Bergische Universität Wuppertal in 2019. Tibor has published more than 60 research papers in cryptography, received an ERC Grant in 2018, and in 2016 the “Best Contribution to IETF Award” for outstanding research contributions to the development of TLS 1.3 from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

  • Jonas von der Heyden
    PhD student

Chair of Control and Cyberphysical Systems, TU Dortmund

  • Moritz Schulze Darup
    Moritz Schulze Darup received a Diploma (M.Sc.) in Mechanical Engineering, a B.Sc. in Physics, and a M.Sc. in Geoscience from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB), Germany, in 2008, 2010, and 2015, respectively. He completed his Ph.D. in Control Engineering in 2014, also at the RUB. From 2014 to 2016, he was a post-doctoral researcher at Oxford University, UK, followed by an academic visit at Melbourne University, Australia. From 2017 until 2020, he was affiliated with Paderborn University, Germany, where he first served as a lecturer in the Automatic Control Group. He then became a Junior Professor and leader of a research group on Encrypted Control funded by the German Research Foundation through its Emmy Noether Programme. Since end of 2020, he is a Full Professor for Control and Cyberphyiscal Systems at TU Dortmund, Germany. Apart from his appointments, he was a young scholar of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and Arts and he is a scholar of the Daimler and Benz Foundation. His research interests include secure, optimal, and robust control for networked systems.

  • Janis Adamek
    PhD Student

Abstract

[EN] Networked control systems are central building blocks for many technologies and often form the backbone of critical infrastructure. Many applications further involve the processing of sensitive and confidential data such as business secrets or personal data. The young but emerging field of encrypted control addresses this issue by combining control schemes with cryptosystems in such a way that confidentiality is guaranteed during the entire control loop. However, while modern cryptography offers strong resilience against attacks on the confidentiality of data, existing realizations of encrypted control are either insufficiently performant for practical use or are based on an informal ad hoc approach that does not reflect the state of the art in modern cryptography and IT security research. Thus, the young technology with great practical relevance has now reached a stage where interdisciplinary collaboration between control engineers and cryptographers is necessary in order to being able to construct systems whose performance and security goes significantly beyond the state of the art. In this project, we will develop special-purpose cryptographic techniques that are tailored to the requirements of modern networked control systems, and we will accordingly adopt the corresponding control algorithms and make them as compatible as possible with the functionalities provided by modern cryptographic techniques. To this end, we will investigate several concrete ideas on the design of special-purpose approximate homomorphic encryption schemes with post quantum security, algorithmic modifications to various modern control algorithms involving machine learning and optimization, and their realizability with modern cryptographic secure computation techniques.

[DE] Vernetzte Regelungssysteme sind zentrale Bausteine für viele Technologien und bilden oft das Rückgrat kritischer Infrastrukturen. Viele Anwendungen verarbeiten darüber hinaus sensible oder vertrauliche Daten wie Geschäftsgeheimnisse oder personenbezogene Daten. Das junge, aufstrebende Gebiet der verschlüsselten Regelungstechnik befasst sich mit diesem Problem, indem es Regelungssverfahren mit Kryptosystemen so kombiniert, dass die Vertraulichkeit im gesamten Regelkreis gewährleistet ist. Während die moderne Kryptografie jedoch eine hohe Resilienz gegen Angriffe auf die Vertraulichkeit von Daten bietet, sind die bestehenden Realisierungen von verschlüsselten Regelungsverfahren entweder nicht ausreichend leistungsfähig für den praktischen Einsatz oder beruhen auf einem informellen Ad-hoc-Ansatz, der nicht dem Stand der modernen Kryptografie und IT-Sicherheitsforschung entspricht. Die junge Technologie mit großer praktischer Relevanz hat also inzwischen ein Stadium erreicht, in dem eine interdisziplinäre Zusammenarbeit zwischen Regelungstechnikern und Kryptographen notwendig ist, um Systeme konstruieren zu können, deren Leistungsfähigkeit und Sicherheit deutlich über den Stand der Technik hinausgehen. In diesem Projekt werden wir spezielle kryptographische Verfahren entwickeln, die auf die Anforderungen moderner vernetzter Regelungssysteme zugeschnitten sind. Gleichermaßen werden wir die zugehörigen Regelungssalgorithmen anpassen und so weit wie möglich mit den Funktionalitäten moderner kryptographischer Verfahren kompatibel machen. Zu diesem Zweck werden wir mehrere konkrete Ideen zum Entwurf spezieller approximativer homomorpher Verschlüsselungsverfahren mit Post-Quantum-Sicherheit, algorithmische Modifikationen verschiedener moderner Regelungsalgorithmen, die maschinelles Lernen und Optimierung einschließen, sowie deren Realisierbarkeit mit modernen beweisbar sicheren Kryptosystemen untersuchen.