Attack-Detection and -Recovery: An Integrated Approach Towards Attack-Tolerant Cyber-Physical Digital Microfluidic Biochips

Abstract

A digital microfluidic biochip (DMFB) with cyber-physical adaptation implements complex bio-protocols with high precision and high throughput dealing with safety-critical applications including point-of-care diagnosis, personalized medicine, and drug development. Having integrated sensors with network connectivity, a cyber-physical DMFB is undeniably susceptible to attacks. A number of leading research works are carried out to assess various attacks and their impacts. Several defense mechanisms are developed by arranging on-chip monitoring systems through deployment of checkpoints. As checkpoints are external resources imposing a cost-overhead to the system, a cost-effective detection mechanism is of utmost importance. Moreover, after detecting an attack, an efficient recovery process is imperative to execute the associated bioassay in a vulnerable environment. Here, an attack-tolerant synthesis is proposed with two-way security through integrating attack-detection and attack-recovery from various Denial of Service attacks. Moreover, a selective re-synthesis approach has been introduced to allow multiple recovery steps to be executed simultaneously on the biochip. The recovery strategy is closely coupled with the detection process which makes the system adaptive towards attack-tolerance. Experimental results on several benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed two-way attack-tolerance strategy.