SOTERIA

Cyber-enabled physical systems include all sorts of military vehicles (e.g. tanks, submarines, aircrafts)of the DoD that need to operate in adversarial environments during their mission. Since many of the military vehicles make use of the legacy hardware and protocols which did not anticipatable attacks on them, developing resilient algorithms and effectively incorporating into the existing legacy systems is one of the fertile areas of research. Our proposal addresses two main directions of research for CPS resiliency. We focus on the Controller Area Network (CAN) protocols.

Many of the DoD vehicles make use of variants of the Controller Area Network (CAN) protocols that were developed with a closed communication network in mind and did not have consider any aspect of security or protocol vulnerability. Even the civilian automotives, trucks and airplanes make use of the variants of CAN protocols that were developed with the assumption that the CAN was no accessible from external world. With the advent of modern Electronic Control Units (ECUs) that are capable of wireless communication, and the availability of the On-Board Diagnostics (OBD) ports, the CAN is no longer a closed network. Recent demonstrations of safety-critical remote attacks clearly show that the assumption of CAN being a closed network is very costly. We propose to address how to identify timing and voltage based covert channels that could be used to establish effective out of band communication among the ECUs for identification and/or authentication. We propose to investigate the resiliency of the recently proposed defense mechanisms against bus-off and voltage-based Intrusion Detection Systems.

Additionally, we propose to initiate the research into developing an analytical framework for the recently proposed BFT++ protocols of the ONR that goes beyond the Byzantine Fault Tolerance. While there is an initial boundary analysis based on inertia and delay, this area remains fertile and the notion of inertia in the context of cyber systems is yet to be uncovered.