1,601 research outputs found
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
Advancing Hardware Security Using Polymorphic and Stochastic Spin-Hall Effect Devices
Protecting intellectual property (IP) in electronic circuits has become a
serious challenge in recent years. Logic locking/encryption and layout
camouflaging are two prominent techniques for IP protection. Most existing
approaches, however, particularly those focused on CMOS integration, incur
excessive design overheads resulting from their need for additional circuit
structures or device-level modifications. This work leverages the innate
polymorphism of an emerging spin-based device, called the giant spin-Hall
effect (GSHE) switch, to simultaneously enable locking and camouflaging within
a single instance. Using the GSHE switch, we propose a powerful primitive that
enables cloaking all the 16 Boolean functions possible for two inputs. We
conduct a comprehensive study using state-of-the-art Boolean satisfiability
(SAT) attacks to demonstrate the superior resilience of the proposed primitive
in comparison to several others in the literature. While we tailor the
primitive for deterministic computation, it can readily support stochastic
computation; we argue that stochastic behavior can break most, if not all,
existing SAT attacks. Finally, we discuss the resilience of the primitive
against various side-channel attacks as well as invasive monitoring at runtime,
which are arguably even more concerning threats than SAT attacks.Comment: Published in Proc. Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) 201
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