Securing Critical Infrastructure from LLM Supply Chain Attacks

About this opportunity

Funded through the University of Waikato Seeker Doctoral Scholarship

Critical infrastructure systems, including industrial manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, and smart grids, are undergoing rapid digital transformation. Industrial Control Systems (ICS), which form the backbone of these sectors, are increasingly being integrated with Large Language Models (LLMs) to support advanced monitoring, predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, incident response, and autonomous control support. While this integration enhances operational efficiency and situational awareness, it also introduces new cybersecurity risks that traditional security controls are not designed to address.

This PhD project investigates an emerging threat to LLM-integrated critical infrastructure: LLM supply chain attacks. These attacks target components across the LLM lifecycle, including pre-trained models, training data, knowledge repositories, software dependencies, external services, prompt collections, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) sources.  In ICS environments, compromised components can influence an LLM's behaviour and decision-making, potentially creating significant cyber-physical consequences.

The research aims to formally define semantic malware and Semantic Supply Chain Attacks (SSCAs) as a new class of cyber-physical threats in LLM-integrated ICS environments, model how supply chain compromises can introduce and propagate semantic malware through operational workflows to cause real-world consequences and develop detection and mitigation mechanisms to secure LLMs deployed within critical infrastructure systems. 

Scholarship Value

Further information about the scholarship, eligibility requirements, and application process can be found at: https://www.waikato.ac.nz/study/scholarships/find-a-scholarship/university-of-waikato-seeker-doctoral-scholarship/.

A Master's degree (or equivalent) with research component in Computer Science, or a closely related discipline.