Prof. Sandeep Shukla

IIT Kanpur, India

Professor Sandeep K. Shukla  is an IEEE fellow, an ACM Distinguished Scientist, and served as an IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitor during 2008-2012, and as an ACM Distinguished Speaker during 2007-2014. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Embedded Systems, and associate editor for ACM transactions on Cyber Physical Systems.  In the past, he has been associate editors for IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, IEEE Design & Test, IEEE Embedded Systems Letters, and many other journals. He has guest-edited more than 15 special issues for various IEEE and ACM journals. He has written or edited 9 books, published over 200 journal and conference papers. He has been program chairs for 4 IEEE/ACM International conferences, and General Chair for 2 of these conferences. He has served on the program committee of more than 100 international conferences and workshops. He supervised 12 PhDs, and directed five post-doctoral scholars at Virginia Tech.  Sandeep's current research focus is on Cyber Security for Critical Infrastructures. He is coordinating a research center on cyber security for critical infrastructures along with his colleagues at IIT Kanpur at the moment.

He received his bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering at Jadavpur University, Kolkata in 1991, his Masters and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Albany, NY, USA in 1995 and 1997 respectively. He worked as a scientist at the GTE labs on telecommunications network management, distributed object technology, and event correlation technologies  between 1997 and 1999. Between 1999 and 2001, he worked at the Intel Corporation on the formal verification of the ITANIUM processor, and on system level design languages. 2001-2002, he was a research faculty at the University of California at Irvine working on embedded system design. From 2002 till 2015, he has been an assistant, associate, and full professor at Virginia Tech, USA. He co-founded the Center for Embedded Systems for Critical Applications (CESCA) in 2007, and has been a director of the center between 2010 and 2012.   In 2015, he joined the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India.  He is currently the Poonam and Prabhu Goel Chair Professor, and Dr.Deep Singh and Daljeet Kaur Faculty Fellow at IIT Kanpur. He is also the head of the Computer Science and Engineering department at IIT Kanpur, joint coordinator of the C3I Lab, and joint coordinator of the national block chain project. 

He received the Ramanujan Fellowship from the Science and Engineering Research Board, Government of India,  the  Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from the White House in 2004, Frederich Wilhelm Bessel Award in 2008 from the Humboldt Foundation, Germany, Virginia Tech Faculty Fellow Award, A distinguished Alumni Award from the State University of New York at Albany, A best paper award at the Asia-Pacific Design Automation Conference, GTE Laboratories Excellence Award,ASEE/ONR Faculty Fellowship in 2005, ASEE/Air Force Senior Faculty Fellowship in 2007, and an Air Force Labs Faculty Fellowship in 2008.   Sandeep also has been a visiting faculty at INRIA, France, University of Kaiserslautern in Germany, MIT, and University of Birmingham UK for various periods of time.                            

Title: Cyber Space: The Next Frontier

A national economy depends on the smooth operation of its critical infrastructures. Power genertion, transmission, distribution; clean water supplies; chemical plants; manufacturing plants;  railway signaling;  air traffic control; and  banking systems are prime examples of critical infrastructure. These infrastructures have been  increasingly computerized and networked for their operations, in the last two decades.  Further, due to digitalization and IP-covergence, these operational computing/communication infrastructure are connected often to enterprise networks. These have led to enhanced cyber-attack opporunties for adversaries. In the recent years, we have seen attacks on steel plant in Germany, chemical plant in Ukraine, power grid in Ukraine and Israel, banking network in Turkey, hydroelectric plant in the US, operational systems of ports in India, on the hospital networks and computers in the UK, and even in India, and many other similar cases. The attackers are getting highly sophisticated through reconaissance of all kinds of cyber assets, and  their exposed interfaces. In India this problem is extremely acute as we do not have a well formulated cyber policy.  Cyber protection of critical infrastructures are particularly weak, and unlike US, UK and Israel, we do not have a cyber defense force to protect our cyber assets. One might take solace in the fact that we have not face a large scale cyber attack causing systemic blackout, or outages of banking networks. However, that is no reason to be complacent as advanced attackers often silently infiltrate the network and plant malware and bots in the computing assets - who wait for command from a remote controller computer to   strike. These are called APTs or advanced persistent threats. These may already be lurking in the wild in many of our infrastructures, and without a proper well considered cyber security posture, continuous surveillance and situational awareness with advanced cyber-tools, we are really defenseless. Unfortunately, much of the cyber-tools are of foreign origin, and hence could carry backdoors, Trojans and other threats themselves. There is a huge need for indigeneous cyber security tools and techniques that are thoroughly certified by competent cyber-security vulnerability assessment methodologies, and penetration testing agencies. At IIT Kanpur, the Interdisciplinary center for Cyber Security and Cyber Defense of critical infrastructures is working towards this goal. In this talk, we will talk about this new frontier of cyber-warfare, and how we are working in developing capabilities and human resource capacity in addressing this growing threat to the nation.