Security Certification of Autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems

Significant progress has been made in the avenues of both software and hardware for fulfilling the objective of trustworthy autonomous cyber-physical systems (CPS). However, technological challenges still exist and particularly in terms of decision making under uncertainty. In an autonomous system, uncertainties can arise from the operating environment, adversarial attacks, and from within the system. As a result of these ambiguities, human-beings lack trust in these systems and hesitate to use them for day-to-day use. To build trust in an autonomous system, manufacturers have to certify them. In this project, we intend to develop methods to facilitate manufacturers for certifying security solutions. Toward this, we will develop new theories to understand the impact of physical and cyber attack on system level properties such as controllability, stability, and safety. We will also develop algorithms for detection and recovery of CPS from physical attacks on sensors of the system. Our recovery method will ensure the system operate within safety bounds during attack. Furthermore, we will develop a new analysis framework that uses platform-based design methodology to represent the CPS and verifies it against design metric constraints such as security, timing, resource, and performance. When CPS satisfy the design metrics, we certify the security solutions to be appropriate for the system.