Fragile Links, Resilient Systems: Toward Trusted Autonomy
Event details
| Date | 25.09.2025 |
| Hour | 11:00 › 12:00 |
| Speaker | Professor Aanjhan Ranganathan |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
| Event Language | English |
Abstract:
Autonomous systems, from drone swarms in the air to connected vehicles on the road, depend on fragile, invisible links: GPS for navigation and wireless networks such as 5G and sidelink for communication. When these links are spoofed, jammed, or degraded, the impact extends far beyond protocols and threatens the reliability of entire systems. In this talk, I will present our recent work on evaluating how adversarial conditions at the navigation and communication layers propagate into system-level failures. I will introduce PRISM, a swarm experimentation platform that integrates GPS, communications, and flight stacks to capture the cyber-physical consequences of attacks, and Dyna5G, a dynamic testbed for studying adversarial scenarios in next-generation cellular networks. Together, these platforms enable us to move from single-drone GPS spoofing demonstrations to swarm-scale analyses, to evaluate communication fragility in connected cars, and to study how cryptographic protocols behave under realistic wireless impairments. I will conclude with a forward-looking vision for trusted autonomy: building resilient systems that can adapt and degrade gracefully, even when their foundational links are under attack.
Bio:
Aanjhan Ranganathan is an Associate Professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University in Boston, USA, where he leads the Signal Intelligence Lab. His research focuses on wireless security, cyber-physical systems, and autonomous swarms, emphasizing both the analysis of adversarial conditions in navigation and communication infrastructures and the development of robust, secure systems to enhance real-world autonomy. He is a recipient of several awards, including the outstanding dissertation award from ETH Zurich, regional winner of the European Space Agency’s Satellite Navigation competition, and NSF CAREER awards. His research has been generously funded by the NSF, Office of Naval Research, U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory, Armasuisse, Google, and Amazon.
Host: Haitham Al Hassanieh. (If you are interested in meeting with Prof. Ranganathan, please contact [email protected])
Autonomous systems, from drone swarms in the air to connected vehicles on the road, depend on fragile, invisible links: GPS for navigation and wireless networks such as 5G and sidelink for communication. When these links are spoofed, jammed, or degraded, the impact extends far beyond protocols and threatens the reliability of entire systems. In this talk, I will present our recent work on evaluating how adversarial conditions at the navigation and communication layers propagate into system-level failures. I will introduce PRISM, a swarm experimentation platform that integrates GPS, communications, and flight stacks to capture the cyber-physical consequences of attacks, and Dyna5G, a dynamic testbed for studying adversarial scenarios in next-generation cellular networks. Together, these platforms enable us to move from single-drone GPS spoofing demonstrations to swarm-scale analyses, to evaluate communication fragility in connected cars, and to study how cryptographic protocols behave under realistic wireless impairments. I will conclude with a forward-looking vision for trusted autonomy: building resilient systems that can adapt and degrade gracefully, even when their foundational links are under attack.
Bio:
Aanjhan Ranganathan is an Associate Professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University in Boston, USA, where he leads the Signal Intelligence Lab. His research focuses on wireless security, cyber-physical systems, and autonomous swarms, emphasizing both the analysis of adversarial conditions in navigation and communication infrastructures and the development of robust, secure systems to enhance real-world autonomy. He is a recipient of several awards, including the outstanding dissertation award from ETH Zurich, regional winner of the European Space Agency’s Satellite Navigation competition, and NSF CAREER awards. His research has been generously funded by the NSF, Office of Naval Research, U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory, Armasuisse, Google, and Amazon.
Host: Haitham Al Hassanieh. (If you are interested in meeting with Prof. Ranganathan, please contact [email protected])
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Organizer
- IC SENS - Professor Haitham Al Hassanieh