5,268 research outputs found
A Formal Approach to Cyber-Physical Attacks
We apply formal methods to lay and streamline theoretical foundations to
reason about Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) and cyber-physical attacks. We focus
on %a formal treatment of both integrity and DoS attacks to sensors and
actuators of CPSs, and on the timing aspects of these attacks. Our
contributions are threefold: (1) we define a hybrid process calculus to model
both CPSs and cyber-physical attacks; (2) we define a threat model of
cyber-physical attacks and provide the means to assess attack
tolerance/vulnerability with respect to a given attack; (3) we formalise how to
estimate the impact of a successful attack on a CPS and investigate possible
quantifications of the success chances of an attack. We illustrate definitions
and results by means of a non-trivial engineering application
SOTER: A Runtime Assurance Framework for Programming Safe Robotics Systems
The recent drive towards achieving greater autonomy and intelligence in
robotics has led to high levels of complexity. Autonomous robots increasingly
depend on third party off-the-shelf components and complex machine-learning
techniques. This trend makes it challenging to provide strong design-time
certification of correct operation.
To address these challenges, we present SOTER, a robotics programming
framework with two key components: (1) a programming language for implementing
and testing high-level reactive robotics software and (2) an integrated runtime
assurance (RTA) system that helps enable the use of uncertified components,
while still providing safety guarantees. SOTER provides language primitives to
declaratively construct a RTA module consisting of an advanced,
high-performance controller (uncertified), a safe, lower-performance controller
(certified), and the desired safety specification. The framework provides a
formal guarantee that a well-formed RTA module always satisfies the safety
specification, without completely sacrificing performance by using higher
performance uncertified components whenever safe. SOTER allows the complex
robotics software stack to be constructed as a composition of RTA modules,
where each uncertified component is protected using a RTA module.
To demonstrate the efficacy of our framework, we consider a real-world
case-study of building a safe drone surveillance system. Our experiments both
in simulation and on actual drones show that the SOTER-enabled RTA ensures the
safety of the system, including when untrusted third-party components have bugs
or deviate from the desired behavior
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