K-State engineer receives Department of Defense grant to build security test bed for all-electric ships
Wednesday, Aug. 30, 2023
MANHATTAN — Hongyu Wu, Kansas State University associate professor of engineering, has received a more than $300,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Defense's Office of Naval Research to build a high-fidelity, cyber-physical test bed for all-electric ships.
Wu will lead the one-year project sponsored by the Defense University Research Instrument Program, "Development of Cyber-Physical Security Testbed for All-Electric Shipboard Power Systems," alongside co-principal investigators Don Gruenbacher, department head and associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Caterina Scoglio, university distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering.
"All-electric ships that run completely on electricity are a promising solution to help the shipping industry save money and reduce pollution," Wu said. "However, these electric ships are vulnerable to increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks. The testbed we build will aid in ships' vulnerability identification, risk assessment, intrusion detection, attack identification and consequence mitigation."
The test bed the team is aiming to build will provide an educational, training and demonstration platform that governmental agencies, industry practitioners and academic institutions may utilize for gaining hands-on experience and identifying future research and development directions.
Specifically, the platform could be used for decision support, situational awareness, performance study, protocol evaluation, standards development, resiliency assessment and cyber penetration testing.
Wu holds the Lucas-Rathbone Professorship in Engineering and is a Steve Hsu keystone research scholar in the Mike Wiegers Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
