Secure Mobile Technologies for Proactive Critical Infrastructure Situational Awareness
This addresses the need for trustworthy operation of national critical infrastructures against threats, though it appears incremental as it applies existing smartphone and security technologies to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of monitoring critical infrastructures like the electricity grid by introducing Eyephone, a system that uses smartphones for secure, proactive sensing of incidents such as potential failures, with results showing it enables effective real-time situational awareness.
Trustworthy operation of our national critical infrastructures, such as the electricity grid, against adversarial parties and accidental failures requires constant and secure monitoring capabilities. In this paper, Eyephone is presented to leverage secure smartphone sensing and data acquisition capabilities and enable pervasive sensing of the national critical infrastructures. The reported information by the smartphone users will notify the control center operators about particular accidental or malicious remote critical infrastructure incidents. The reporting will be proactive regarding potentially upcoming failures given the system's current risky situation, e.g., a tree close to fall on a power grid transmission line. The information will include various modalities such as images, video, audio, time and location. Eyephone will use system-wide information flow analysis and policy enforcement to prevent user privacy violations during the incident reportings. A working proof-of-concept prototype of Eyephone is implemented. Our results show that Eyephone allows secure and effective use of smartphones for real-time situational awareness of our national critical infrastructures.