GRAMMATECH INC — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: N15A-T022

Description

Cyber physical systems are ubiquitous in the modern world; they control transportation, energy, military, medical, and manufacturing infrastructures. Cyber resiliency remains a problem in these systems that rely on both functional and real-time specifications to meet physical, and often safety-critical, goals. We propose a system that integrates existing software strengthening tools (e.g., automated program repair and software hardening) with practical static real-time specification checking to enhance the functional robustness of the target systems while ensuring continued schedulability and real-time specification adherence. The underlying techniques will benefit in a dual fashion: we propose enhancements to the scalability and extensibility of static runtime calculation and consequently will improve upon state-of-the-art software strengthening techniques (in terms of program validation and performance), thus expanding their applicability to operate on the targeted cyber physical systems. The resulting framework will help to guard against both known and unknown vulnerabilities in these critical systems while accounting for schedulability, thus enhancing their cyber resiliency in practice.