Tech Talk: “Weaponizing Fragility in Critical Infrastructures: Implications for Next Generation Resilience”

Abstract:
Critical infrastructures are complex, large-scale systems with integrated cyber, physical, and human dynamics. These dynamics invariably create differing thresholds for disruption, and they invite the design of payloads that exploit them to create catastrophic cascading failures across the system.  This talk introduces persistent interaction attacks designed to destabilize complex infrastructures by weaponizing the system’s intrinsic dynamics against itself.  We show how customary theoretical research promoting engineering robustness can be turned on its head to design the provably “stealthiest” payloads (in a certain sense) that, if deployed, will destabilize the infrastructure dynamics.  These methods lead to new business models for cyber criminals, requiring little subject matter expertise for payload design and instead making use of dynamic infrastructure models–models that are becoming more easily available from new AI technologies.  Countering such attacks demands secure-by-design engineering strategies, and we present some new tools for doing this, including new approaches for visualizing the attack surface and quantifying the intrinsic, or cyber-physical, vulnerabilities of an infrastructure system.

Bio:
Sean Warnick is a professor of Computer Science at Brigham Young University, where he has been on the faculty since 2003.  Prior to that, he was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied control theory, and an undergraduate at Arizona State University, earning his BSE in Electrical Engineering in 1993.  He attended ASU on scholarship from the Flinn Foundation, graduating summa cum laude, and was named the Outstanding Graduate of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He has also held visiting positions from Cambridge University (2006), the University of Maryland at College Park (2008), and the University of Luxembourg’s Centre for Systems Biomedicine (2014). Sean was named the Distinguished Visiting Professor by the National Security Agency three years in a row, 2008-2010, for his work with their Summer Program for Operations Research Technology, and he maintains strong industrial partnerships, advising and consulting with various companies, including a visiting position at Applied Invention LLC., a technology innovation incubator, since 2014.  He most recently served as the Senior Technical Advisor for Advanced Computing in the Technology Centers Division of the Science and Technology Directorate at the US Department of Homeland Security, Jan 2022 – Jan 2025.  Sean founded Achilles Heel Technologies, Inc. in 2018, a cyber-security company protecting critical infrastructures, where he serves as Chairman of the Board, and he currently serves on the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Fast Track Action Committee on Cyber-Physical Resilience.