Dr. Sandip Ray, Warren B. Nelms Endowed Professor, has received an NSF research award to develop new approaches for identifying security vulnerabilities earlier in the design of vehicular systems. The project is titled “Collaborative Research: CSR: VERITAS: Secure Vehicular Systems through Intelligent Information Flow Verification.”
“The goal of the project is to make connected and autonomous vehicles safer and more secure,” said Dr. Ray. “Modern vehicles rely on complex networks of computers, software, sensors, and communication systems, creating new security risks when information flows in unintended ways between vehicle components.”
In collaboration with researchers at Portland State University and Clemson University, Dr. Ray and the team will integrate realistic digital twins, formal verification, and artificial intelligence to analyze complex interactions across vehicle subsystems. By creating a real-time digital replica, or digital twin, of a vehicle system, they are hoping to uncover vulnerabilities that can be difficult to detect with current testing methods.
The project also advances the foundations of scalable security verification. By using machine learning to guide formal reasoning, the team aims to reduce the expert intervention traditionally required for complex security analysis. The new findings can be used to in the future to support safer deployment of autonomous vehicles and create security analysis methods that can also be applied to other critical cyber-physical systems.