CPS: Medium: Quantitative Contract-Based Synthesis and Verification for CPS Security

Abstract: Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are deployed in safety-critical and mission-critical applications for which security is a primary design concern. At the same time, these systems must be designed to be more flexible to changing requirements and environment conditions. This project pursues foundational work on a new methodology for CPS design to enable a "plug-and-play" approach that also ensures the security and safety of the system from the design phase. Such a principled design approach can have an enormous positive impact on the emerging national "smart" infrastructure. Through collaborations with industry partners, the project aims to improve the design process in the CPS industry with a particular focus on automotive systems. Additionally, this project plans to integrate research into undergraduate and graduate coursework, especially capstone projects, and will have an impact on the textbooks and online course content developed by the researchers. This project develops a fundamentally new theory for quantitative contract-based design of CPS that balances security requirements with critical safety and performance concerns. This theory meets a pressing need faced by industrial cyber-physical systems, which are being transformed by a push towards "plug-and-play" design architectures. This push tends to upend the design process for CPS, bringing with it renewed concerns about security and privacy. The proposed approach has the following key components: (i) a precise interface specification for each "plug-in" component in a novel quantitative temporal logic; (ii) rapid, run-time verification methods for checking component conformance to specifications, and (iii) A new approach for mapping components onto existing architectures while satisfying performance and security specifications, and minimizing costs. The approach will be developed and evaluated in an industrial automotive context. The proposed rigorous logic-based formalism, backed by algorithmic advances in verification and synthesis, has the potential to create new fundamental science and help put the industrial trend towards plug-and-play architectures on a firm footing.