Hello everyone! My name is Kameren Jouhal and I am a rising sophomore here at the University of Pittsburgh. I am currently majoring in computer science and minoring in business, and I plan on minoring in computational engineering as well. I have been interested in computer science for a long time now, and I started programming in middle school. I am excited to expand my knowledge in the field and work towards a career in cybersecurity in the future. Business, specifically business management and entrepreneurship, peaked my interest in the beginning of high school. I plan on going to graduate school to get an MBA, so completing a business minor is my first step into that journey. I hope to start my own business somewhere during my career. I became interested in engineering towards the end of high school, and I joined my school’s robotics team to get experience in mechanical engineering. I ended up loving it, so I want to apply some engineering aspects to my computer science degree by getting a computational engineering minor.
The aspect of the SHURE-Grid program that excites me the most is the idea of combining all three of the topics I am interested in into the project. Computer science is prominent in this project, as we will be attempting to replace traditional IT cybersecurity practices with new, more secure methods. The engineering side of the project comes from the idea of CIE itself. CIE stands for cyber-informed engineering, which is the process of taking into account and implementing cybersecurity aspects into the engineering of critical functions of current and future systems. The business aspect of this project comes from constructing a business model out of our project and reaching out to different beneficiaries of our idea to see if it is a viable solution. My team and I will continually adjust our business model as we talk to more people so we can come up with the solution that will best fit our target market’s needs.
The project that my team has decided to do is Justifying Cyber-Informed Engineering. For this project, we will be justifying the use of CIE throughout the entire design process of new systems particularly pertaining to the power grid, starting from the earliest phase possible. We will also be advocating for CIE additions to current systems in the grid. The idea of this project is to come up with reasons that CIE will be better than traditional methods of implementing cybersecurity. We need to convince executives and the engineers themselves that a change of culture and diverting from traditional design processes will be more secure, have better cost and time efficiency, will lower the cost of operation of the system, etc. This idea is critical to the security of a system that uses digital technology because considering and implementing cybersecurity measures into engineering design will prevent intelligent adversaries from misusing normal functionality to disrupt or break critical functions of the system. Our goal is to mitigate damages done by adversaries that bypass traditional cybersecurity measures by instituting safeguards in critical functions, which in turn will help keep the system running even during a cyberattack and also reduce the amount of money and time needed to fix and secure the system.
The other project that my team considered was Trade-Offs for Cyber-Informed Engineering. This project required the navigation of different trade-offs involved with implementing CIE in a system, including resources, time, cost, etc. The goal of this project was to weigh the trade-offs involved with the CIE process and strategize which solutions would be better than others based on them. This is crucial to the security of critical functions of a system because whichever aspects engineers and designers choose to prioritize over others will have an impact on how effective the security of system will be, and other measures may have to be considered to ensure that an adversary cannot damage the system by cyber means.