SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) Systems allow operators to remotely control equipment. As such, they are a main part in almost every country’s core infrastructure and can be found in water desalination systems, power plants, and traffic light systems, etc. This ability to access the systems remotely, however, renders the equipment vulnerable to cyber attacks. In recent years, there have been an increasing number of attempts and successful attacks on these systems and detection and prevention of such attacks have become a task with national importance. My project aims to find a new sophisticated technique to detect and defend such intrusions using modeling and machine learning techniques.

I have been involved with Cyber security for many years and I have a deep interest in the topic. Working for several different companies as a security researcher and an engineer has exposed me to this topic and its importance and has fostered my interest in doing research in the field.