Alvaro A. Cardenas Research Group

University of California, Santa Cruz

How can autonomous and cyber-physical systems detect and recover from real-world adversarial manipulations to sensors and actuators? The research group designs and evaluates attack detection and real-time recovery architectures for autonomous vehicles, drones, and robotic systems using physics-aware and common-sense reasoning in control loops. The researchers perform measurement studies and resilient-control designs for industrial control systems and the power grid, analyzing real-world ICS/SCADA attacks and proposing monitoring and resilient architectures. The lab develops ML- and AI-based methods for automated cybersecurity tasks including anomaly detection, alert fusion, and incident response for critical infrastructures. The group prototypes and evaluates defenses in platforms ranging from consumer drones to large-scale power-grid measurement datasets.