{"id":577,"date":"2025-03-27T21:06:43","date_gmt":"2025-03-27T21:06:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/events.research.purdue.edu\/cerias\/?page_id=577"},"modified":"2025-03-27T21:06:43","modified_gmt":"2025-03-27T21:06:43","slug":"sean-warnick","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/events.research.purdue.edu\/cerias\/sean-warnick\/","title":{"rendered":"Sean Warnick"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Dr. Sean Warnick<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Professor of Computer Science
Brigham Young University<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Tech Talk: “Weaponizing Fragility in Critical Infrastructures: Implications for Next Generation Resilience”<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Abstract:<\/strong>
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\u00a0the system.\u00a0 This talk introduces persistent interaction attacks<\/em> designed to destabilize complex infrastructures by weaponizing the system’s intrinsic\u00a0dynamics against itself.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bio:<\/strong>
Sean Warnick is a professor of Computer Science at Brigham Young University, where he has been on the faculty since 2003.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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)\u00a0Fast Track Action Committee on Cyber-Physical Resilience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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\u00a0the system.\u00a0 This talk introduces persistent interaction […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-577","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/events.research.purdue.edu\/cerias\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/events.research.purdue.edu\/cerias\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/events.research.purdue.edu\/cerias\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/events.research.purdue.edu\/cerias\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/events.research.purdue.edu\/cerias\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=577"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/events.research.purdue.edu\/cerias\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/577\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":578,"href":"https:\/\/events.research.purdue.edu\/cerias\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/577\/revisions\/578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/events.research.purdue.edu\/cerias\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}