RESILIENCE IS THE CYBERSECURITY OF THE XXI CENTURY – (TAKE II): THE SAGA OF AI/ML-DRIVEN AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES
Title: Resilience is the Cybersecurity of the XXI Century – (TAKE II): The saga of AI/ML-driven Autonomous Vehicles.
Speaker: Paulo Esteves-Veríssimo (paulo.verissimo@kaust.edu.sa/; https://cemse.kaust.edu.sa/people/person/paulo-verissimo).
Summary: Currently, there is a substantial push towards autonomous vehicles (AV) in the market. However, fully autonomous vehicles, though using extensive fault-tolerance e.g., in x-by-wire functions, are still not quite safe from an accidental faults perspective.
The growing number of recent AV architectures hinging on the advancements in AI/ML models, given their functional power, must be put in context with an equally significant number of related serious or fatal accidents. I advance by presenting important misconceptions and pitfalls originating from the use of inappropriate AI/ML techniques in the AV area, which may be the cause of serious accidents. Furthermore, AV present an even greater threat surface to combined accidental faults and malicious attacks. These pitfalls have been very slowly recognized by car makers, with potentially harming results.
However, simultaneously securing unavoidable properties of Safety and Security is a hard problem. I raise a bit of the curtain on how to break this chicken and egg dilemma, presenting some solution avenues based on cyber resilience, a core subject of my research. I will discuss architectures featuring fault and intrusion resilience of ECUs at system level, as well as reconciling the stochastic nature of AI/ML with the determinism of driving control theory, at algorithmic level, leveraging the best from both worlds: trustworthiness and intelligence.
Biography: Paulo Esteves-Veríssimo is a professor at KAUST University (SA) and Director of its Resilient Computing and Cybersecurity Center (https://rc3.kaust.edu.sa/). He is also Research Fellow of SnT at the University of Luxembourg (LU), and Adjunct Professor of ECE at Carnegie Mellon University (US). He was a member of the Sci&Tech. Comm. of ECSO EU Cyber Security Org., and the representative of UNILU in two of the four hubs of the H2020 European Competence Network of Cybersecurity Centres of Excellence. Previously, he has been a professor and FNR PEARL Chair at UNILU, and professor at the University of Lisbon (PT). He was Chair of IFIP WG 10.4 on Dependable Comp. and F/T, and vice-Chair of the Steer. Comm. of the DSN conference. He is Fellow of IEEE and of ACM, and former associate editor of IEEE Trans. on Computers (TC) and Trans. on Emerging Topics in Computing (TETC), author of over 200 peer-refereed publications and co-author of 5 books. He is currently interested in resilient computing, in areas like: SDN-based infrastructures; autonomous vehicles; distributed control systems; digital health and genomics; or blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Check his works on: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=aMHx8aUAAAAJ.
Registration: Participation is free. However, registration is required on Eventbrite at the following link: "Cybersecurity Resilience: The Saga of AI/ML-driven Autonomous Vehicles".
Recording: The seminar recording can be found at this link.