Securing Cyber-Physical Systems: From Sensor-Layer Attacks to Firmware Binary Analysis

Name: Yonatan Gizachew Achamyeleh

Chair: Mohammad Al Faruque
Member: Zhou Li
Member: Yasser Shoukry

Date: 05/18/2026
Time: 01:00 PM PT
Location: ISEB 1010

Title: Securing Cyber-Physical Systems: From Sensor-Layer Attacks to Firmware Binary Analysis
Abstract: This dissertation advances security across the full stack of cyber-physical systems, from the physical sensor layer to the firmware binary layer. Four contributions demonstrate that sensors are a pervasive and underprotected attack surface, showing that pressure sensors can be exploited to eavesdrop on nearby audio, acoustic signals can destabilize UAV flight, physical sensor corruption misaligns Vision-Language Model-driven robots, and sensor rate of change can trigger hardware Trojans covertly. Three further contributions develop tools for semantic recovery from stripped industrial firmware, spanning binary embeddings, function name prediction, and LLM-guided decompilation, achieving over 94% recompilability across six architectures. The unifying argument is that the sensor and binary layers are structurally coupled, and that securing one requires understanding the other.

Bio: Yonatan Gizachew Achamyeleh is a PhD candidate in Computer Engineering at the University of California, Irvine, advised by Professor Mohammad Abdullah Al Faruque. His research spans cyber-physical systems security, embedded binary analysis, and the intersection of physical-layer attacks with AI-driven autonomy.