The integration of wireless communication technologies in industrial automation offers greater flexibility, but also exposes safety systems to a broader threat vector. Emerging regulations, such as the draft standard prEN 50742, mandate the convergence of functional safety and cybersecurity by requiring cryptographic security mechanisms directly in safety-critical communication. This paper presents an empirical evaluation of this safety-security convergence across a complete control chain, spanning from an IO-Link Wireless Safety device to a PLC via an OPC UA backbone. We measure the latencies and jitter of different Safety-Related Security Levels under prEN 50742 over Ethernet, Wi-Fi 6, and private 5G. Our results reveal that while cryptographic execution time is negligible, the resulting frame payload expansion severely restricts wireless fieldbus capacity, reducing the maximum number of devices per IO-Link Wireless track from 8 to 2. Furthermore, we demonstrate that, despite higher average latency, a private 5G provides sufficiently deterministic latency characteristics to preserve functional safety watchdog margins, unlike unlicensed Wi-Fi 6.
Natural-language control offers a promising interface for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), but directly applying self-hosted computer-use agents (SHCUAs) to UAV control introduces a structural mismatch. SHCUAs are designed for interactive host-side tool use, where delayed agent i…
Encrypted control lets a cloud coordinate a fleet of agents on fully homomorphically encrypted state, keeping their positions and commands private. The approximate scheme for real-valued control, CKKS, returns decryptions that carry the encryption noise, a key-recovery leak; the…
Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are increasingly deployed in every aspect of our lives and can be compromised through memory corruption vulnerabilities, allowing attackers to hijack the control flow and take over the system. Existing techniques mostly focus on detecting such attack…
In this paper, we revisit the problem of an encrypted model predictive control (MPC) design, representing a significant challenge in the recent field of secure process control. Existing methods in secure optimization-based control are non-existent and even partial implementation…
Learning-based separation assurance for small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) achieves near-zero collision rates in simulation, but assumes accurate position and velocity information from Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). This assumption fails in urban environments, wh…
Low-altitude uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) can pose growing risks to airspace safety, security, and privacy. Cellular infrastructure can passively sense them without dedicated radar hardware by exploiting integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) technology. Most prior work e…