SPHERE CPS Enclave: Reconfigurable Testbed for CPS
SPHERE CPS Enclave is a reconfigurable, remotely accessible industrial-control experimentation environment for repeatable and shareable cybersecurity studies spanning PLC logic, SCADA/HMI interaction, process telemetry, and configurable network behavior.
- Agency
- NSF Mid-Scale RI
- Status
- Active
- Themes
- 2
Overview
Project narrative
The SPHERE CPS Enclave provides a modular ICS environment for reproducible cyber-physical security research. It combines PLC-based control, modular I/O, SCADA/HMI interaction, and an isolated configurable network segment, with optional simulated components to emulate larger process contexts.
Our current public-facing workflow demonstrates a water-treatment scenario from setup through execution: provisioning control and monitoring stacks, running baseline behavior, introducing representative faults or adversarial manipulations, and collecting synchronized controller, network, and process telemetry for replay and offline analysis.
As part of the broader NSF SPHERE infrastructure, the CPS enclave is designed to support cross-team collaboration through standardized experiment packaging and reproducibility-first workflows.
Capabilities
What the project enables
Provision PLC logic, I/O mappings, monitoring tools, and network topology through a unified SPHERE workflow
Run baseline and adversarial scenarios with safe, controlled fault/attack injection
Capture synchronized process variables, controller state, and network traces for replay and post-hoc analysis
Support both hardware-in-the-loop setups and simulation-backed experiments
Enable remote experimentation with security policies aligned to safe research operations
Use Cases
Where this work applies
Physics-aware detection and resilience evaluation using digital-twin-informed monitoring
SCADA/ICS cyber-physical exercises and adversarial scenario testing
PLC control-logic manipulation studies under realistic process constraints
Formal verification and conformance checks grounded in testbed telemetry
Related Work
Nearby projects
NSF FMitF / 2022–2025
FMitF: Formal Verification & Implementation Stack for PLCs
FMitF develops a provably correct stack that links formal hybrid-system models to PLC implementations, combining verified runtime monitoring with bidirectional model-code translation for industrial control systems.
DARPA / 2020–2021 (18 months)
SMELL-CPS: Symbolic Math Expressions from Low-level Logic in Cyber-Physical Systems
SMELL-CPS developed methods to extract interpretable mathematical expressions and semantic structure from low-level CPS control binaries, enabling reverse engineering, assurance analysis, and downstream automated testing workflows.