SOUTH KINGSTOWN – A University of Rhode Island engineering professor received a six-figure grant from the National Science Foundation to help develop programs designed to disrupt cyberattacks.
Hui Lin, a URI assistant professor of engineering, and his team received a five-year, $500,000 grant from the foundation for their “CAREER: PARP: Mislead Physical-Disruption Attacks by Preemptive Anti-Reconnaissance for Power Grids’ Cyber-Physical Infrastructures” project. Lin said in a statement that his research objective is to increase the resilience of industrial control systems.
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Lin said typically when attacks happen, people try to detect them and recover information as soon as possible. But Lin said instead of passive detection, he’s proposing disrupting and even misleading some of the reconnaissance that potential attackers perform.
“It’s like setting a trap for the attackers even before they initiate any malicious activities. In this way, if the attackers can design some sort of attack strategy, their design will be based on misleading information,” Lin said.
URI said Lin hopes to develop mathematical programs that will detect when a system is being targeted. From there, the university said, his program would feed the potential attacker false information in such a way that it is accepted as accurate, all the while leaving the legitimate activities unaffected.
James Bessette is the PBN special projects editor, and also covers the nonprofit and education sectors. You may reach him at Bessette@PBN.com. You may also follow him on Twitter at @James_Bessette.
