Speaker:
Vireshwar Kumar
Purdue University

Abstract:

The upcoming smart transportation systems which consist of connected autonomousvehicles, are poised to transform our everyday life. The sustainability and growth of these systemsto their full potential will significantly depend on the robustness of these systems against securityand privacy threats. Unfortunately, the communication protocols employed in these systems lackmainstream network security capabilities due to energy constraints of the deployed platforms andbandwidth constraints of the communication medium. In this talk, I will present the results of myefforts in anatomizing the two vital communication protocols employed in the smart transportation:(1) vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication protocol which is utilized to facilitate wirelesscommunication among connected vehicles, and (2) controller area network (CAN) protocol whichis utilized within an autonomous vehicle to enable real-time control of critical automotivecomponents including brakes. For each of these two protocols, I will first describe the inquisitiveapproach which led to the discovery of the new security vulnerabilities. Then, through theexperiments on real-world systems, I will demonstrate how these vulnerabilities can be exploitedto launch malicious attacks which evade the state-of-the-art defense mechanisms employed inthese systems. I will conclude the talk by discussing novel countermeasures which are requiredto mitigate these fundamental vulnerabilities and prevent their exploitation.

About:

Dr. Vireshwar Kumar is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of ComputerScience at Purdue University. Vireshwar earned his B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering at IndianInstitute of Technology Delhi in 2009, and Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering at Virginia Techin 2016. He was the recipient of the outstanding Ph.D. student award by the Center for EmbeddedSystems for Critical Applications at Virginia Tech. He also had a short stint as a Project Assistantin the Department of Electrical Communication Engineering at Indian Institute of Science in 2010.His research interests include discovering and mitigating security vulnerabilities in thecommunication protocols employed in cyber-physical systems, e.g., smart home, smarttransportation and smart city. Vireshwar’s research work has featured in top-tier security venuesincluding ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) and IEEETransactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS). He has also served on the TPC offlagship conferences including IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security(CNS) and IEEE International Symposium on Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks (DySPAN).

The weekly security seminar has been held every semester since spring of 1992. We invite personnel at Purdue and visitors from outside to present on topics of particular interest to them in the areas of computer and network security, computer crime investigation, information warfare, information ethics, public policy for computing and security, the computing "underground," and other related topics. More info