Towards Declarative Safety Rules for Perception Specification Architectures

Agriculture has a high number of fatalities compared to other blue collar fields, additionally population decreasing in rural areas is resulting in decreased work force. These issues have resulted in increased focus on improving efficiency of and introducing autonomy in agriculture. Field robots are an increasingly promising branch of robotics targeted at full automation in agriculture. The safety aspect however is rely addressed in connection with safety standards, which limits the real-world applicability. In this paper we present an analysis of a vision pipeline in connection with functional-safety standards, in order to propose solutions for how to ascertain that the system operates as required. Based on the analysis we demonstrate a simple mechanism for verifying that a vision pipeline is functioning correctly, thus improving the safety in the overall system.Comment: Presented at DSLRob 2015 (arXiv:1601.00877

myTrustedCloud: Trusted cloud infrastructure for security-critical computation and data managment

Copyright @ 2012 IEEECloud Computing provides an optimal infrastructure to utilise and share both computational and data resources whilst allowing a pay-per-use model, useful to cost-effectively manage hardware investment or to maximise its utilisation. Cloud Computing also offers transitory access to scalable amounts of computational resources, something that is particularly important due to the time and financial constraints of many user communities. The growing number of communities that are adopting large public cloud resources such as Amazon Web Services [1] or Microsoft Azure [2] proves the success and hence usefulness of the Cloud Computing paradigm. Nonetheless, the typical use cases for public clouds involve non-business critical applications, particularly where issues around security of utilization of applications or deposited data within shared public services are binding requisites. In this paper, a use case is presented illustrating how the integration of Trusted Computing technologies into an available cloud infrastructure - Eucalyptus - allows the security-critical energy industry to exploit the flexibility and potential economical benefits of the Cloud Computing paradigm for their business-critical applications

A survey on cyber security for smart grid communications

A smart grid is a new form of electricity network with high fidelity power-flow control, self-healing, and energy reliability and energy security using digital communications and control technology. To upgrade an existing power grid into a smart grid, it requires significant dependence on intelligent and secure communication infrastructures. It requires security frameworks for distributed communications, pervasive computing and sensing technologies in smart grid. However, as many of the communication technologies currently recommended to use by a smart grid is vulnerable in cyber security, it could lead to unreliable system operations, causing unnecessary expenditure, even consequential disaster to both utilities and consumers. In this paper, we summarize the cyber security requirements and the possible vulnerabilities in smart grid communications and survey the current solutions on cyber security for smart grid communications. © 2012 IEEE

Towards Identifying and closing Gaps in Assurance of autonomous Road vehicleS - a collection of Technical Notes Part 1

This report provides an introduction and overview of the Technical Topic Notes (TTNs) produced in the Towards Identifying and closing Gaps in Assurance of autonomous Road vehicleS (Tigars) project. These notes aim to support the development and evaluation of autonomous vehicles. Part 1 addresses: Assurance-overview and issues, Resilience and Safety Requirements, Open Systems Perspective and Formal Verification and Static Analysis of ML Systems. Part 2: Simulation and Dynamic Testing, Defence in Depth and Diversity, Security-Informed Safety Analysis, Standards and Guidelines

TCG based approach for secure management of virtualized platforms: state-of-the-art

There is a strong trend shift in the favor of adopting virtualization to get business benefits. The provisioning of virtualized enterprise resources is one kind of many possible scenarios. Where virtualization promises clear advantages it also poses new security challenges which need to be addressed to gain stakeholders confidence in the dynamics of new environment. One important facet of these challenges is establishing 'Trust' which is a basic primitive for any viable business model. The Trusted computing group (TCG) offers technologies and mechanisms required to establish this trust in the target platforms. Moreover, TCG technologies enable protecting of sensitive data in rest and transit. This report explores the applicability of relevant TCG concepts to virtualize enterprise resources securely for provisioning, establish trust in the target platforms and securely manage these virtualized Trusted Platforms

RADIS: Remote Attestation of Distributed IoT Services

Remote attestation is a security technique through which a remote trusted party (i.e., Verifier) checks the trustworthiness of a potentially untrusted device (i.e., Prover). In the Internet of Things (IoT) systems, the existing remote attestation protocols propose various approaches to detect the modified software and physical tampering attacks. However, in an interoperable IoT system, in which IoT devices interact autonomously among themselves, an additional problem arises: a compromised IoT service can influence the genuine operation of other invoked service, without changing the software of the latter. In this paper, we propose a protocol for Remote Attestation of Distributed IoT Services (RADIS), which verifies the trustworthiness of distributed IoT services. Instead of attesting the complete memory content of the entire interoperable IoT devices, RADIS attests only the services involved in performing a certain functionality. RADIS relies on a control-flow attestation technique to detect IoT services that perform an unexpected operation due to their interactions with a malicious remote service. Our experiments show the effectiveness of our protocol in validating the integrity status of a distributed IoT service.Comment: 21 pages, 10 figures, 2 table