Cybersecurity researchers have discovered new vulnerabilities that could provide criminals with wireless access to the computer systems in automobiles, aircraft, factories, and other cyber-physical systems.
The computers used in vehicles and other cyber-physical systems rely on a specialized internal network to communicate commands between electronics. Because it took place internally, it was traditionally assumed that attackers could only influence this network through physical access.
In collaboration with Hyundai, researchers from Georgia Tech’s Cyber-Physical Systems Security Research Lab (CPSec) observed that threat models used to evaluate the security of these technologies were outdated.
The team, led by Ph.D. student Zhaozhou Tang, found that vehicle technology advancements allowed attackers to launch new attacks, improve existing attacks, and circumvent current defense systems.
For example, Tang’s findings included the possibility for attackers to remotely compromise the computers used in cars and aircraft through Wi-Fi, cellular, Bluetooth, and other wireless channels.
“Our job was to thoroughly review existing information and find ways to protect against these attacks,” he said. “We found new threats and proposed a defense system that can protect against the new and old attacks.”
In response to their findings, the team developed ERACAN, the first comprehensive defense system against this new generation of attackers. Designed to detect new and old attacks, ERACAN can deploy defenses when necessary.
The system also classifies the attacks it reacts to, providing security experts with the tools for detailed analysis. It has a detection rate of 100% for all attacks launched by conventional methods and detects enhanced threat models 99.7% of the time.
The project received a distinguished paper award at the 2024 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 24) held in Salt Lake City. Tang presented the paper at the October conference.
“This was Zhaozhou’s first paper in his Ph.D. program, and he deserves recognition for his groundbreaking work on automotive cybersecurity,” said Saman Zonouz, associate professor in the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has designated the transportation sector as one of the nation’s 16 critical infrastructure sectors. Ensuring its security is vital to national security and public safety.
“Modern vehicles, which rely heavily on controller area networks for essential operations, are integral components of this infrastructure,” said Zonouz. “With the increasing sophistication of cyberthreats, safeguarding these systems has become critical to ensuring the resilience and security of transportation networks.”
This paper introduced to the scientific community the first comprehensive defense system to address advanced threats targeting vehicular controller area networks.
The CPSec team is putting the technology it has developed into practice in collaboration with Hyundai America Technical Center, Inc., which sponsors the work. Tang hopes ERACAN’s success will raise awareness of these new threats in the research community and industry.
“It will help them build future defenses,” he said. “We have demonstrated the best practice to defend against these attacks.”
Tang received his bachelor’s degree at Georgia Tech, where he first performed security-related work for the automobile industry. While working with Zonouz on his master’s degree, he decided to change course and pursue research initiatives like vehicle security in a Ph.D. program.
“It is interesting how it came full circle,” he said. “I will continue on this path of automobile security throughout my Ph.D.”
ERACAN: Defending Against an Emerging CAN Threat Model, was written by Zhaozhou Tang, Khaled Serag from the Qatar Computing Research Institute, Saman Zonouz, Berkay Celik and Dongyan Xu from Purdue University, and Raheem Beyah, professor and dean of the College of Engineering. The CPSec Lab is a collaboration between the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
John Popham
Communications Officer II
School of Cybersecurity and Privacy
Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science Under Secretary Geri Richmond with Georgia Tech Researchers
As head of the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science, the nation’s largest federal sponsor of physical sciences research, Under Secretary Geri Richmond understands the vital role of higher education in advancing U.S. science and innovation. On Monday, Nov. 18, she visited Georgia Tech with Chief of Staff in the Office of the Under Secretary for Science and Innovation Ariel Marshall, Ph.D. Chem 14, to meet with students and faculty and discuss future opportunities for collaboration.
During the visit, Richmond and Marshall toured Dr. Thomas Orlando’s electron and photo induced chemistry on surfaces lab; the Invention Studio; Dr. Akanksha Menon’s water-energy research lab; and the AI Maker Space.
Richmond also joined the Women+ in Chemistry student group for a roundtable discussion. An advocate for underrepresented groups in STEM fields, Richmond is the founding director of the Committee on the Advancement of Women Chemists (COACh). COACh is a grassroots organization dedicated to ensuring equal opportunities for all in science.
Georgia Tech’s longstanding partnership with the DOE is centered on research and technology development aimed at advancing energy systems and promoting sustainability. The Institute plays a key role in the DOE’s national initiatives, contributing to transformative work in energy efficiency, renewable energy, nuclear power, and environmental sustainability. Through joint research programs, grants, and initiatives, Georgia Tech continues to drive innovation and push the boundaries of energy solutions for a sustainable future.
Top Row (Left to Right): Michael Biehler, Winner of 2024 James G. Campbell Fellowship, Erin Phillips & Sanggyun Kim - 2024 Spark Award Winners
Bottom Row (Left to Right): Keun Hee Kim, Richard Asiamah, Erik Barbosa - 2024 Spark Award Winners
The Strategic Energy Institute and the Energy, Policy, and Innovation Center at Georgia Tech are proud to announce the winners of the James G. Campbell Fellowship and Spark Awards for 2024.
Michael Biehler, a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, has been selected as the recipient of the 2024 James G. Campbell Fellowship. The Fellowship is an annual award given to a Georgia Tech graduate student studying renewable energy systems. Candidates are nominated by their advisors in recognition of their exceptional academic achievements in the field of renewable energy.
Biehler’s research leverages multi-modal machine learning to tackle critical challenges in manufacturing, such as enhancing energy efficiency in manufacturing processes. He is advised by Jianjun (Jan) Shi, Carolyn J. Stewart Chair and Professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering.
“I consider this award an incredible honor, and the support means a lot to me, especially with the recent arrival of our second daughter—it will make a significant difference for us,” says Biehler.
The Annual Spark Award recognizes current graduate students who have exhibited outstanding leadership in promoting student engagement with energy research at Georgia Tech, with evidence of broader impacts and service/leadership. The Spark Award recipients for 2024 include Georgia Tech graduate students Richard Asiamah, Erik Barbosa, Keun Hee Kim, Sanggyun Kim, and Erin Phillips.
Richard Asiamah is a third-year Ph.D. student in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). His research focuses on power systems optimization, emphasizing the efficient integration of renewable energy resources into the electricity grid. Asiamah has recently worked as a graduate electrical engineering intern at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, and is currently serving as the president of the ECE Graduate Students’ Organization.
Erik Barbosa is pursuing a doctorate in mechanical engineering and works under Akanksha Menon, assistant professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. His work in the Water Energy Research Lab focuses on utilizing inorganic salt hydrates to develop thermochemical energy storage, ranging from the material level to system scale, to decarbonize heat for building applications. Barbosa has been actively engaged with mentoring undergraduate students and high schoolers by exposing them to innovative technologies that decarbonize energy.
Keun Hee Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in the Woodruff School. Kim’s research focuses on developing solid polymer electrolytes and artificial interlayers for lithium metal batteries, and synthesizing oxygen evolution reaction and oxygen reduction reaction catalyst materials for proton exchange membrane fuel cells and water electrolyzers.
Sanggyun Kim is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in materials science and engineering, advised by Juan-Pablo Correa-Baena, assistant professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering. Kim’s research focuses on understanding the complex interfacial interactions between hybrid organic-inorganic halide perovskite films and newly designed charge transport layers in perovskite solar cells (PSCs). His goal is to drive progress in solar energy technology by integrating novel polymer- and molecule-based interlayers, improving the efficiency and stability of PSCs to support more sustainable photovoltaic solutions.
Erin Phillips is a doctoral student in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Her research addresses difficulties associated with lignin valorization, which includes controlling the isolation of lignin from the original irregular lignocellulose structure and depolymerizing lignin into aromatic monomer units via mechanocatalysis. These aromatics can further be valorized as renewable sources for the creation of biofuels and other green chemicals. Phillips is currently serving as the president of the Technical Association of the Pulp and Paper Industry (TAPPI) student chapter at Georgia Tech.
News Contact: Priya Devarajan || SEI Communications Program Manager
As greenhouse gases accumulate in the Earth’s atmosphere, scientists are developing technologies to pull billions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air and inject it deep underground.
The idea isn’t new. In the 1970s, Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti suggested that the carbon dioxide polluting the air and warming the planet could be stored underground. The reality of how to do it cost-effectively and safely has challenged scientists for decades.
Geologic carbon storage — the subterranean storage of CO2 — comes with significant challenges, most importantly, how to avoid fracturing underground rock layers and letting gas escape into the atmosphere. Carbon, a gas, can behave erratically or leak whenever it’s stored in a compressed space, making areas geologically unstable and potentially causing legal headaches for corporations that invest in it. This uncertainty, coupled with the expense of the carbon capture process and its infrastructure, means the industry needs reliable predictions to justify it.
Georgia Tech researcher and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar Felix J. Herrmann has an answer. His lab, Seismic Laboratory for Imaging and Modeling (SLIM), uses advanced artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to create algorithms that monitor and optimize carbon storage. The algorithms work as “digital twins,” or digital replicas of underground systems, facilitating the safe, efficient storage of CO2 underground.
“The trick is you want the carbon to stay put — to avoid the risk of, say, triggering an earthquake or the carbon leaking out,” said Herrmann, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “We’re developing a digital twin that allows us to monitor and control what is happening underground.”
Predicting the Best Place
Waveform Variational Inference via Subsurface Extensions with Refinements (WISER) is an algorithm that uses sound waves to analyze underground structures. WISER runs on AI, enabling it to work more efficiently than most algorithms while remaining computationally feasible. To improve accuracy, WISER makes small adjustments using sound wave physics to show how fast sound travels through different materials and where there’s variation in underground layers. This helps to create detailed, reliable images of underground areas for better predictions of carbon storage.
WISER allows researchers to work with uncertainties, which is vital for understanding the risk of these underground storage projects.
Scaling the Algorithm
While Herrmann’s lab has been working to apply neural networks to seismic imaging for years now, WISER required them to increase the networks’ scale. Making multiple predictions is a much larger problem that requires a bigger, more potent network, but these types of neural networks only run on graphics processing units (GPUs), which are known for speed but are limited in memory.
To optimize the GPU, Rafael Orozco, a computational science and engineering Ph.D. student, created a new type of neural network that can train with very little memory. This open-source package, InvertibleNetworks, enables the network to train on very large inputs and create multiple output images conditioned on the observed seismic data.
WISER’s fundamental innovation is for the lab’s next concept: creating digital twins for carbon storage. These twins can act as monitoring systems to optimize and mitigate risks of carbon storage projects.
Devising the Digital Twin
Digital twins are dynamic virtual models of objects in the real world, capable of replicating their behavior and performance. They rely on real-time data to evolve and have been used to replicate factories, cities, spacecraft, and bodies, to make informed decisions about healthcare, maintenance, production, supply chains, and — in Herrmann’s case — geologic carbon storage.
Herrmann and his team have developed an “uncertainty-aware” digital twin. That means the tool can manage risks and make decisions in an uncertain, unseen environment — because it’s been designed to recognize, quantify, and incorporate uncertainties in CO2 storage.
Probing the Unseen
Subsurface conditions are diverse and complex, making the management of greenhouse gas storage a delicate process. Without careful monitoring, the injection of CO2 can increase pressure in rock formations, potentially fracturing the cap rock that is supposed to keep the gas underground.
“The digital twin addresses this through simulations in tandem with observations,” said Herrmann, whose team linked two different scientific fields — geophysics and reservoir engineering — for a more comprehensive understanding of the subsurface environment. Specifically, they combined geophysical well observations with seismic imaging.
Geophysical well observation involves drilling a hole in the subsurface in a geological area of interest and collecting data by lowering a probe into the borehole to take measurements. Seismic imaging, on the other hand, uses acoustic waves to create images based on the analysis of wave vibrations.
“Bridging the gap between different fields of research and combining various data sources allows our digital twin to provide a more accurate and detailed picture of what’s happening underground,” Herrmann said.
To integrate and leverage these diverse datasets built from observations and simulations, the team used advanced AI techniques like simulation-based inference and sequential Bayesian inference, a method of updating information as more data becomes available. The ongoing learning allows researchers to quantify uncertainties in the subsurface environment and predict how that system will respond to CO2 injection. The digital twin updates its understanding as new data becomes available.
Making Informed Decisions
Herrmann’s team tested the digital twin, simulating different states of an underground reservoir, including permeability, which is the measure of how easily fluids flow through rock. The goal was to find the maximum injection rate of CO2 without causing fractures in the cap rock.
“The work highlights how dynamic digital twins can play a key role in mitigating the risks associated with geologic carbon storage,” said Herrmann, whose research group is supported in part by large oil and gas companies, including Chevron and ExxonMobil. “Companies are now in the process of starting large offshore projects for which the digital twin is being developed.”
But there is still plenty of work to be done, he added. For instance, the digital twin can monitor the subsurface and provide critical information about that uncertain environment. It can inform. But it still needs adjustments by humans for each new CO2 injection site, and Herrmann and his team are working on further developing the technology — giving the digital twins the ability to quickly replicate themselves so they can be deployed massively and quickly to meet the demands of mitigating climate change.
“Our aim is to make them smarter,” Herrmann said. “To make them more adaptable, so they can control CO2 injections, become more responsive to risks, and adapt to a wide range of complex situations in real time.”
Writers: Jerry Grillo and Tess Malone
Media Contact: Tess Malone | tess.malone@gatech.edu
EnergyHack @GT is a hackathon designed to bring together passionate students to develop solutions addressing the critical challenges in the energy industry. Over the course of 36 hours, participants will collaborate in teams to brainstorm, design, and prototype projects (for example, AI/ML projects, web-based tools, mobile applications, etc.) that promote sustainable practices based on diverse problem statements. The projects will be evaluated by an esteemed panel of judges.
Members of the Georgia Tech community are opening their doors once again as part of the 11th annual Atlanta Science Festival. This year, Science and Engineering Day at Georgia Tech will serve as the kickoff event for the entire festival!
From left, Georgia Tech's Nakia Melecio, Keith McGreggor, and Raghupathy "Siva" Sivakumar, are the NSF I-Corps Southeast Hub director, faculty lead, and principal investigator, respectively.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a syndicate of eight Southeast universities — with Georgia Tech as the lead — a $15 million grant to support the development of a regional innovation ecosystem that addresses underrepresentation and increases entrepreneurship and technology-oriented workforce development.
The NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) Southeast Hub is a five-year project based on the I-Corps model, which assists academics in moving their research from the lab to the market.
Led by Georgia Tech’s Office of Commercialization and Enterprise Innovation Institute, the NSF I-Corps Southeast Hub encompasses four states — Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and Alabama.
Its member schools include:
In January 2025, when the NSF I-Corps Southeast Hub officially launches, the consortium of schools will expand to include the University of Puerto Rico. Additionally, through Morehouse College’s activation, Spelman College and the Morehouse School of Medicine will also participate in supporting the project.
With a combined economic output of more than $3.2 trillion, the NSF I-Corps Southeast Hub region represents more than 11% of the entire U.S. economy. As a region, those states and Puerto Rico have a larger economic output than France, Italy, or Canada.
“This is a great opportunity for us to engage in regional collaboration to drive innovation across the Southeast to strengthen our regional economy and that of Puerto Rico,” said the Enterprise Innovation Institute’s Nakia Melecio, director of the NSF I-Corps Southeast Hub. As director, Melecio will oversee strategic management, data collection, and overall operations.
Additionally, Melecio serves as a national faculty instructor for the NSF I-Corps program.
“This also allows us to collectively tackle some of the common challenges all four of our states face, especially when it comes to being intentionally inclusive in reaching out to communities that historically haven’t always been invited to participate,” he said.
That means bringing solutions to market that not only solve problems but are intentional about including researchers from Black and Hispanic-serving institutions, Melecio said.
Keith McGreggor, director of Georgia Tech’s VentureLab, is the faculty lead charged with designing the curriculum and instruction for the NSF I-Corps Southeast Hub’s partners.
McGreggor has extensive I-Corps experience. In 2012, Georgia Tech was among the first institutions in the country selected to teach the I-Corps curriculum, which aims to further research commercialization. McGreggor served as the lead instructor for I-Corps-related efforts and led training efforts across the Southeast, as well as for teams in Puerto Rico, Mexico, and the Republic of Ireland.
Raghupathy “Siva” Sivakumar, Georgia Tech’s vice president of Commercialization and chief commercialization officer, is the project’s principal investigator.
The NSF I-Corps Southeast Hub is one of three announced by the NSF. The others are in the Northwest and New England regions, led by the University of California, Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, respectively. The three I-Corps Hubs are part of the NSF’s planned expansion of its National Innovation Network, which now includes 128 colleges and universities across 48 states.
As designed, the NSF I-Corps Southeast Hub will leverage its partner institutions’ strengths to break down barriers to researchers’ pace of lab-to-market commercialization.
"Our Hub member institutions have successfully commercialized transformative technologies across critical sectors, including advanced manufacturing, renewable energy, cybersecurity, and biomedical fields,” said Sivakumar. “We aim to achieve two key objectives: first, to establish and expand a scalable model that effectively translates research into viable commercial ventures; and second, to address pressing societal needs.
"This includes not only delivering innovative solutions but also cultivating a diverse pipeline of researchers and innovators, thereby enhancing interest in STEM fields — science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.”
U.S. Rep. Nikema Williams, D-Atlanta, is a proponent of the Hub’s STEM component.
“As a biology major-turned-congresswoman, I know firsthand that STEM education and research open doors far beyond the lab or classroom.,” Williams said. “This National Science Foundation grant means Georgia Tech will be leading the way in equipping researchers and grad students to turn their discoveries into real-world impact — as innovators, entrepreneurs, and business leaders.
“I’m especially excited about the partnership with Morehouse College and other minority-serving institutions through this Hub, expanding pathways to innovation and entrepreneurship for historically marginalized communities and creating one more tool to close the racial wealth gap.”
That STEM aspect, coupled with supporting the growth of a regional ecosystem, will speed commercialization, increase higher education-industry collaborations, and boost the network of diverse entrepreneurs and startup founders, said David Bridges, vice president of the Enterprise Innovation Institute.
“This multi-university, regional approach is a successful model because it has been proven that bringing a diversity of stakeholders together leads to unique solutions to very difficult problems,” he said. “And while the Southeast faces different challenges that vary from state to state and Puerto Rico has its own needs, they call for a more comprehensive approach to solving them. Adopting a region-oriented focus allows us to understand what these needs are, customize tailored solutions, and keep not just our hub but our nation economically competitive.”
Péralte C. Paul
peralte@gatech.edu
404.316.1210
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded Georgia Tech researchers a $4.6 million grant to develop improved cybersecurity protection for renewable energy technologies.
Associate Professor Saman Zonouz will lead the project and leverage the latest artificial technology (AI) to create Phorensics. The new tool will anticipate cyberattacks on critical infrastructure and provide analysts with an accurate reading of what vulnerabilities were exploited.
“This grant enables us to tackle one of the crucial challenges facing national security today: our critical infrastructure resilience and post-incident diagnostics to restore normal operations in a timely manner,” said Zonouz.
“Together with our amazing team, we will focus on cyber-physical data recovery and post-mortem forensics analysis after cybersecurity incidents in emerging renewable energy systems.”
As the integration of renewable energy technology into national power grids increases, so does their vulnerability to cyberattacks. These threats put energy infrastructure at risk and pose a significant danger to public safety and economic stability. The AI behind Phorensics will allow analysts and technicians to scale security efforts to keep up with a growing power grid that is becoming more complex.
This effort is part of the Security of Engineering Systems (SES) initiative at Georgia Tech’s School of Cybersecurity and Privacy (SCP). SES has three pillars: research, education, and testbeds, with multiple ongoing large, sponsored efforts.
“We had a successful hiring season for SES last year and will continue filling several open tenure-track faculty positions this upcoming cycle,” said Zonouz.
“With top-notch cybersecurity and engineering schools at Georgia Tech, we have begun the SES journey with a dedicated passion to pursue building real-world solutions to protect our critical infrastructures, national security, and public safety.”
Zonouz is the director of the Cyber-Physical Systems Security Laboratory (CPSec) and is jointly appointed by Georgia Tech’s School of Cybersecurity and Privacy (SCP) and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE).
The three Georgia Tech researchers joining him on this project are Brendan Saltaformaggio, associate professor in SCP and ECE; Taesoo Kim, jointly appointed professor in SCP and the School of Computer Science; and Animesh Chhotaray, research scientist in SCP.
Katherine Davis, associate professor at the Texas A&M University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has partnered with the team to develop Phorensics. The team will also collaborate with the NREL National Lab, and industry partners for technology transfer and commercialization initiatives.
The Energy Department defines renewable energy as energy from unlimited, naturally replenished resources, such as the sun, tides, and wind. Renewable energy can be used for electricity generation, space and water heating and cooling, and transportation.
John Popham
Communications Officer II
College of Computing | School of Cybersecurity and Privacy
Deepakraj Divan has been appointed to the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Electricity Advisory Committee (EAC) by U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm. Divan is a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and the Center for Distributed Energy.The EAC was established to enhance leadership in electricity delivery modernization and provide senior-level counsel to the DOE on ways in which the nation can meet many of the challenges associated with the rapidly unfolding energy transition.
The group reports to the DOE’s Assistant Secretary for Electricity and consists of 40 members representing a cross-section of energy stakeholders, including from utilities, industry, regional entities, industry, cyber security experts, natural gas sector and others.
Divan is the sole representative from academia and advanced research on the EAC.
“I am honored by this appointment to the EAC and look forward to providing inputs to ensure that the U.S.takes a holistic view on the highly disruptive energy transition, one that provides abundant, economical and equitable energy to meet our near-term and long-term energy needs, but where our sustainability and climate goals are also met,” Divan said. “Rapid development, deployment and scaling of globally competitive new technologies are a key element of this. I look forward to working with the DOE and other EAC members on these critical issues over the next two years.”
During his two-year term, Divan will advise the DOE on key issues related to current and future electric grid resilience, security, reliability, sector interdependence, and policy issues of concern.
The EAC periodically reviews and makes recommendations on DOE electric grid-related programs and initiatives, including electricity-related research and development programs and modeling efforts. The committee also helps to identify emerging issues, address the growing interdependence of and risk to critical and defense critical electric infrastructure, and help ensure national policy and programs are aligned to manage and prosper from the ongoing energy transition.
Divan is highly-respected for his expertise, having been active in grid related research and entrepreneurship for over 40 years. He is well-recognized in the field, including as a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Engineering’s Transformative Science & Technology Committee, a past member of the NASEM Board on Energy and Environmental Systems, the 2021 NASEM Committee on the Future of Electric Power in the US, and is the recipient of the 2024 IEEE Power Engineering Medal.
His research focuses on advanced power electronics and grid related research, and the acceleration of deep-tech to market, especially in grid related areas.
He is also the coauthor of a new book – ‘Energy 2040: Aligning Innovation, Economics and Decarbonization’ by Divan and Sharma, that provides a holistic view of the energy transition, identifies major challenges (especially with the grid), and shows a path forward.
Zachary Winiecki