CSC5113C – Advanced Topics in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Security Author: [Your Name] Date: April 14, 2026 Abstract While traditional cybersecurity (CSC5113A) worries about data confidentiality and integrity, and network security (CSC5113B) focuses on packet transmission, CSC5113C occupies a far more dangerous intersection: the marriage of physics, real-time constraints, and adversarial control. This paper argues that the core difficulty of CPS security is not the complexity of the code, but the tyranny of timing . We introduce the concept of the “Synchronization Gap”—the mismatch between digital computation speed and physical process speed—as the primary attack surface. Using three case studies (a smart grid relay, an autonomous emergency braking system, and a robotic surgical arm), we demonstrate that the most devastating attacks do not crash the system; they merely convince it that time has slowed down . 1. Introduction: The Silent Shift CSC5113A taught us to build firewalls. CSC5113B taught us to encrypt tunnels. CSC5113C teaches us a humbling lesson: A dam doesn’t care about your SSL certificate.
The CSC5113C Paradox: Why Securing the Invisible Clock is Harder than Stopping a Bullet csc5113c
Attack: The adversary does not trigger a false fault. Instead, they inject a low-rate denial-of-service (LoRDOS) on the relay’s GPS timing source. The relay’s clock drifts by only 10ms. CSC5113C – Advanced Topics in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS)
You cannot simultaneously know the exact physical state of a CPS and respond to it securely, because the act of securing (encryption, authentication, attestation) adds unbounded latency. 3. Attack Taxonomy: Three Ways to Break the Clock Traditional attacks (buffer overflow, SQLi) are trivial in comparison to these three classes unique to CSC5113C: Using three case studies (a smart grid relay,