Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are deployed in safety-critical and mission-critical applications for which security is a primary design concern. At the same time, these systems must be designed to be more flexible to changing requirements and environment conditions. This project pursues foundational work on a new methodology for CPS design to enable a "plug-and-play" approach that also ensures the security and safety of the system from the design phase. Such a principled design approach can have an enormous positive impact on the emerging national "smart" infrastructure. Through collaborations with industry partners, the project aims to improve the design process in the CPS industry with a particular focus on automotive systems. Additionally, this project plans to integrate research into undergraduate and graduate coursework, especially capstone projects, and will have an impact on the textbooks and online course content developed by the researchers. This project develops a fundamentally new theory for quantitative contract-based design of CPS that balances security requirements with critical safety and performance concerns. This theory meets a pressing need faced by industrial cyber-physical systems, which are being transformed by a push towards "plug-and-play" design architectures. This push tends to upend the design process for CPS, bringing with it renewed concerns about security and privacy. The proposed approach has the following key components: (i) a precise interface specification for each "plug-in" component in a novel quantitative temporal logic; (ii) rapid, run-time verification methods for checking component conformance to specifications, and (iii) A new approach for mapping components onto existing architectures while satisfying performance and security specifications, and minimizing costs. The approach will be developed and evaluated in an industrial automotive context. The proposed rigorous logic-based formalism, backed by algorithmic advances in verification and synthesis, has the potential to create new fundamental science and help put the industrial trend towards plug-and-play architectures on a firm footing.

Automation is being increasingly introduced into every man-made system. The thrust to achieve trustworthy autonomous systems, which can attain goals independently in the presence of significant uncertainties and for long periods of time without any human intervention, has always been enticing. Significant progress has been made in the avenues of both software and hardware for meeting these objectives. 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. While a lot of work has been done on ensuring safety of systems under standard sensing errors, much less attention has been given on securing it and its sensors from attacks. As such, autonomous cyber-physical systems (CPS), which rely heavily on sensing units for decision making, remain vulnerable to such attacks. Given the fact that the age of autonomous CPS is upon us and their influence is gradually increasing, it becomes an urgent task to develop effective solutions to ensure the security and trustworthiness of autonomous CPS under adversarial attacks. The researchers of this project provide a comprehensive real-time, resource-aware solution for detection and recovery of autonomous CPS from physical and cyber-attacks. This project also includes effort to educate and prepare the community for the potential cyber and physical threats on autonomous CPS. With the observation that a thorough security certification of autonomous CPS will provide formal evaluation of autonomous CPS, the researchers in this project intend to develop methods to facilitate manufacturers for certifying security solutions. Toward this goal, the researchers will first develop new theories to understand the impact of physical and cyber-attack on system level properties such as controllability, stability, and safety. They will then develop algorithms for detection and recovery of CPS from physical attacks on active sensors. The proposed recovery method will ensure the integrity of sensor measurements when the system is under attack. Furthermore, a new analysis framework will be constructed that uses platform-based design methodology to represent the CPS and verifies it against design metric constraints such as security, timing, resource, and performance. The key contributions of this project towards autonomous CPS security certification include 1) a comprehensive study of relationship between attacks and system-level properties; 2) algorithms and their optimization for detection and automatic recovery of autonomous CPS from attacks; and 3) systematically quantifying impact of security on design metrics.