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Unit name |
Resilient Socio-technical Infrastructures |
Unit code |
COMSM0030 |
Credit points |
30 |
Level of study |
M/7
|
Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24)
|
Unit director |
Professor. Awais Rashid |
Open unit status |
Not open |
Pre-requisites |
COMSM0032
|
Co-requisites |
None
|
School/department |
School of Computer Science |
Faculty |
Faculty of Engineering |
Description including Unit Aims
Students will learn about approaches to keep large socio-technical infrastructures in operation when they operate in partially-trusted settings and even when parts of the infrastructure are compromised, e.g., inclusion of malicious human actors, software or hardware. Topics will include:
- Resilience as more than just a technical issue, inter-relationship between security and safety, and integrated safe-secure architectures.
- How trust is formed and impacted, how to engender trust in large-scale socio-technical infrastructures by the general public and users and mitigating adversarial behaviours in such infrastructures.
- Integrity and recoverability of information (while preserving privacy) in large-scale infrastructures.
- Technical approaches to resilience, e.g., moving target defence, automated software diversity, autonomous (secure) arbitration of resources, hardware roots of trust.
- Graceful recovery when compromised, including automated and semi-automated techniques.
Students undertake an extensive analysis of two major testbed infrastructures, reflect on their resilience and make proposals for improvements.
Aims
Students will develop a deep understanding of the challenges of keeping infrastructures operational when under attack and gain hands-on expertise in analysing large-scale infrastructures from a resilience perspective.
Intended Learning Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this unit students are expected to:
- Have knowledge of techniques and methods for detecting when large-scale infrastructures are under attack.
- Be able to analyse the underlying causes of the compromise and develop strategies to keep the infrastructure operational while limiting the attackers’ movement through to other parts of the infrastructure.
- Have knowledge of techniques to recover the infrastructure to a fully operational, secure and safe state.
- Ability to analyse the problems from different disciplinary perspectives and devise solutions that synthesise different disciplinary perspectives – leverage both human and technical resources in such infrastructures.
- Hands-on knowledge and experience of working on TIPS problems in real-world contexts.
Teaching Information
This unit will delivered through a combination of synchronous and asynchronous sessions including taught classes, Q&A sessions and office hours.
Assessment Information
Coursework (100%)
- Analysis of the Bristol Cyber Security testbed - group work - 40%
- Analysis of the Energy Demand Management System - group work - 40%
- Critical reflection - Individual Work - 20%
Reading and References
Fundamental reading will be the Cyber-Physical Systems knowledge area from the Cyber Security Body of Knowledge (http://www.cybok.org).