Indian American Professor and students find way to prevent manufacturing shutdown during cyberattacks

Indian American Rajiv Malhotra, an associate professor in the Rutgers School of Engineering Department of Mechanical and Aerospace engineering, and his team of students, have found a way to keep manufacturing to continue in the face of a cyberattack.

Malhotra earned his Master’s degree in mechanical engineering from IIT Kanpur, and went on to do his PhD from Northwestern University, Illinois.

The finding of Malhotra and team was published in the Journal of Manufacturing Systems. It dwells on creating “geometric and process digital twins”, or actual replicas of the systems, which would strengthen the manufacturing process’ ability to withstand attacks, a March 19, 2026, news article on Rutgers.edu, reported.

“Their work also addresses a foundational challenge in scalability resulting from constraints on manufacturing, materials, cost, and supply chain that has previously impeded resilience,” the University said.

Cyberattacks hamper production of a range of items from electronics and spacecraft to biomedical devices and cars, Malhotra et al noted.

“Traditional approaches for addressing the threat of cyberattacks rely on reporting and detecting the issue and shutting production down, while plugging the gaps in the cyber layer before production starts again, which can take weeks with no guarantees that the next attack won’t exploit some other gap in the cyber layer,” Malhotra is quoted saying in the news article.

Malhotra, a Google Scholar, joined Rutgers in 2017. He was previously an assistant professor at Oregon State University.

“Creating resilience against such attacks ensures uninterrupted production of high-quality mission-critical parts even though harm from ongoing attacks in the cyber layer has yet to be the damaged parts fixed,” he added.

When there is a cyberattack, the “digital twins” that Malhotra and his team has developed, “rapidly repair” the damaged parts “such as the part model, machine firmware and the process plan generation software,” Malhotra said.

“We are also expanding this approach towards expeditionary manufacturing for defense and space applications – and are also very interested in collaborating with other industry partners beyond our current scope,” he added.

Malhotra holds 2 patents – Laser induced plasma micromachining (LIPMM), and System and method for accumulative double sided incremental forming.