CHARLES RIVER ANALYTICS, INC. — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: N15A-T022

Description

Cyber physical systems are employed widely in Navy operations. As these systems become more interconnected, they become more exposed to cyber-attacks. Traditional fault tolerance techniques that use redundant hardware and software are designed for physical and random failures that are unintentional; they are far less effective against intentional attacks that target all redundant components. Therefore, cyber physical system operators, application developers, and system administrators need a resilient system-level architecture that can detect and isolate compromised software components and restore functionality, all while continuing to meet real-time service requirements.<br>To protect cyber physical systems from threats, we propose an Embedded Architecture for Cyber-resilience (EAC). Our framework extends the Composite operating system developed by team member, George Washington University. EAC ensures fine-grained isolation of both system- and application-level components. The system monitoring component collects information about the behavior and inter-component communications for all components. Given this monitored information, we use novel anomaly detection algorithms to detect and locate compromises. When a component is compromised, our system automatically restores that component to a known good state. EAC uniquely combines a component-based operating system structure with novel system monitoring and fault detection algorithms to provide attack and fault resiliency for cyber physical systems.