Chengcheng Zhao

Papers

Total Citations

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About

Chengcheng Zhao is a leading researcher in the cybersecurity of cyber-physical systems, with a particular focus on industrial robotics and smart manufacturing. Her work addresses a critical vulnerability in modern factories: replay attacks, where adversaries manipulate a robot’s operation while feeding the monitoring system pre-recorded, normal movement data to avoid detection. To counter this, Zhao pioneered two groundbreaking fingerprinting techniques. Her 2021 paper, "Fingerprinting Movements of Industrial Robots for Replay Attack Detection" (20 citations), and her 2020 work, "Detecting replay attacks against industrial robots via power fingerprinting" (19 citations), introduce novel methods that leverage unique physical signatures—such as movement patterns and power consumption—to distinguish authentic robot behavior from malicious replays. These contributions are foundational to the field of CPS security, offering practical, hardware-level defenses that do not require modifying existing industrial infrastructure. Zhao’s research is highly influential, directly addressing the safety and integrity of automated production lines, and is essential reading for anyone working at the intersection of robotics, control systems, and cybersecurity.