Biblio
Due to the wide adoption of IoT/CPS systems, embedded devices (IoT frontends) become increasingly connected and mission-critical, which in turn has attracted advanced attacks (e.g., control-flow hijacks and data-only attacks). Unfortunately, IoT backends (e.g., remote controllers or in-cloud services) are unable to detect if such attacks have happened while receiving data, service requests, or operation status from IoT devices (remotely deployed embedded devices). As a result, currently, IoT backends are forced to blindly trust the IoT devices that they interact with.To fill this void, we first formulate a new security property for embedded devices, called "Operation Execution Integrity" or OEI. We then design and build a system, OAT, that enables remote OEI attestation for ARM-based bare-metal embedded devices. Our formulation of OEI captures the integrity of both control flow and critical data involved in an operation execution. Therefore, satisfying OEI entails that an operation execution is free of unexpected control and data manipulations, which existing attestation methods cannot check. Our design of OAT strikes a balance between prover's constraints (embedded devices' limited computing power and storage) and verifier's requirements (complete verifiability and forensic assistance). OAT uses a new control-flow measurement scheme, which enables lightweight and space-efficient collection of measurements (97% space reduction from the trace-based approach). OAT performs the remote control-flow verification through abstract execution, which is fast and deterministic. OAT also features lightweight integrity checking for critical data (74% less instrumentation needed than previous work). Our security analysis shows that OAT allows remote verifiers or IoT backends to detect both controlflow hijacks and data-only attacks that affect the execution of operations on IoT devices. In our evaluation using real embedded programs, OAT incurs a runtime overhead of 2.7%.
For the task with complicated manipulation in unstructured environments, traditional hand-coded methods are ineffective, while reinforcement learning can provide more general and useful policy. Although the reinforcement learning is able to obtain impressive results, its stability and reliability is hard to guarantee, which would cause the potential safety threats. Besides, the transfer from simulation to real-world also will lead in unpredictable situations. To enhance the safety and reliability of robots, we introduce the force and haptic perception into reinforcement learning. Force and tactual sensation play key roles in robotic dynamic control and human-robot interaction. We demonstrate that the force-based reinforcement learning method can be more adaptive to environment, especially in sim-to-real transfer. Experimental results show in object pushing task, our strategy is safer and more efficient in both simulation and real world, thus it holds prospects for a wide variety of robotic applications.