Prof. Paulo Verissimo

Bio:
Paulo Veríssimo is currently a professor of the Department of Informatics (DI) of the University of Lisboa Faculty of Sciences and Director of LASIGE, a research laboratory of the DI. He is Fellow of the IEEE. He is also associate editor of the Elsevier Int’l Journal on Critical Infrastructure Protection, and past associate editor of the IEEE Tacs. on Dependable and Secure Computing. He belonged to the European Security & Dependability Advisory Board. He is past Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Fault Tolerant Computing and of the Steering Committee of the DSN conference, and belonged to the Executive Board of the CaberNet European Network of Excellence. He was coordinator of the CORTEX IST/FET project (http://cortex.di.fc.ul.pt). Paulo Veríssimo leads the Navigators research group of LASIGE, and is currently interested in: architecture, middleware and protocols for distributed, pervasive and embedded systems, in the facets of real-time adaptability and fault/intrusion tolerance.
He is author of more than 130 refereed publications in international scientific conferences and journals in the area, and co-author of five books.

Challenges of Architecting Resilient Critical Information Infrastructures

This lecture will focus on innovative concepts related to achieving trustworthiness of control system cyber architectures such as used in modern critical information infrastructures. Power grids will be used as example, since they are an excellent case study on the challenges of future control systems.
Over the past few decades, utility infrastructures have become largely computerized, remotely/automatically controlled, and interconnected. Such a web of critical information infrastructures became susceptible to digital accidental faults and computer-borne malicious cyber attacks, and understanding the problems related with resilience is a complex task, due to their hybrid composition (SCADA, corporate intranets and Internet).
However, these infrastructures must be architected and managed having in mind even better security and dependability goals than classical IT systems, in order to present very high levels of resilience. The need for a new architecture is explained by the fact that cyber architectures for process control, despite being basically physical processes controlled by computers interconnected by networks, exhibit a potentially huge cost of failure in socio-economic terms, thus bringing extremely demanding requirements, which have not been previously found together in a same class of computer-based systems.The lecture will discuss some recent advances in this area, based on concepts that help realize the innovative vision of automatic security. We present a reference architecture for advanced critical infrastructures featuring a combination of: aprioristic prevention of known attack and vulnerability combinations; middleware devices that achieve automatic security, through tolerance of remaining faults and intrusions; use of trusted-trustworthy components and architectural hybridization; perpetual unattended operation through proactive and reactive recovery mechanisms for self-healing.

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