BOZEMAN — Two grants from the Idaho National Laboratory are advancing the work of researchers at Montana State University’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Gianforte School of Computing to make the country’s critical infrastructure safer from cyberattacks.  

“Cybersecurity impacts us all whether we know it or not,” said Todd Kaiser, head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Norm Asbjornson College of Engineering. “It protects our personal data, fiscal transactions, energy delivery and eventually all aspects of our life.”  

In January, INL awarded a $255,000, three-year grant to electrical and computer engineering professor Brock LaMeres and Clemente Izurieta, professor of computer science and co-director of the Software Engineering and Cybersecurity Lab, to fund a project called “Programmable Hardware Authenticity Self Evaluation.”  

Also in January, INL awarded $210,000 to Bradley Whitaker, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, for a project “Artificial Neural Network Enabled Decode of Gigabit Ethernet.”  

“This isn’t like protecting documents on a network in the cloud,” said LaMeres, who also directs MSU’s Montana Engineering Education Research Center. “We’re concerned with things like the electrical power grid, water treatment plants and hospital treatment networks.”   

Those areas are especially attractive targets to hackers, he said.   

“There are foreign adversaries that would like to cause chaos by potentially weakening our defense,” LaMeres said. “There are also domestic attackers who wish to make money off ransomware attacks and bad actors who simply want to see whether they can bring something down.”   

The malicious activities that concern LaMeres and Izurieta are called “side-channel attacks,” which attackers use to passively monitor a computer system’s power consumption. Sophisticated attackers can use that information to determine when the computer might be performing particular tasks, suggesting when the system is most vulnerable to attack. 

“What [Izurieta] and I are doing is trying to confuse the attacker by obfuscating the power signature of the computer,” LaMeres said.  

Previous countermeasures relied on software to forestall attackers, but that approach can create a signature decipherable by high-tech hackers.   

To eliminate these telltale signatures, the two scientists are building on technology LaMeres developed for computers used in space. In space, radiation can damage sensitive computer hardware such as microchips and processors. LaMeres and Izurieta use a related technology called a field programmable gate array that allows the computer to create random signals to help defend against would-be attackers.  

“Think of it as randomizing a sentence’s letters by scrambling them,” said Izurieta. “And only we – not the hackers – know how to unscramble that. So, an attacker won’t be able to do nefarious things with these computers. We can borrow from these scrambling technologies to create random signatures that hackers will not understand when performing side-channel attacks.” 

Whitaker’s research involves the other side of this equation: identifying and monitoring potentially malicious incoming instructions from bad actors.   

“My aim is to automatically detect and interpret how computers talk to each other,” Whitaker said. “From a security perspective, you can insert yourself into a communication pipeline without disturbing the incoming message in a way that neither the sender nor the receiver would know that the communication was intercepted. As some people say, the best cyber defense is a good cyber offense.”  

Two graduate students and two undergraduates work on these projects.