Abstract

In this article, we put forward the substantial challenges in cyber resilience in the domain of autonomous systems and outline foundational solutions to address these challenges. These solutions fall into two broad themes: resilience-by-design and resilience-by-reaction . We use several application drivers from autonomous systems to motivate the challenges in cyber resilience and to demonstrate the benefit of the solutions. We focus on some autonomous systems in the near horizon (autonomous ground and aerial vehicles) and also a little more distant (autonomous rescue and relief). For resilience-by-design , we focus on design methods in software that are needed for our cyber systems to be resilient. In contrast, for resilience-by-reaction , we discuss how to make systems resilient by responding, reconfiguring, or recovering at runtime when failures happen. We also discuss the notion of adaptive execution to improve resilience, execution transparently and adaptively among available execution platforms (mobile/embedded, edge, and cloud). For each of the two themes, we survey the current state, and the desired state and ways to get there. We conclude the paper by looking at the research challenges we will have to solve in the short and the mid-term to make the vision of resilient autonomous systems a reality. This article came out of discussions that started at the NSF-sponsored Grand Challenges in Resilience Workshop held at Purdue in 2019 with the co-authors contributing to going into the depth of the issues and then this article.

Highlights

  • We lay out our vision for resilience in autonomous systems and our view of the short-term and mid-term research challenges to realize the vision

  • 1) Resilience by design: This is the aspect that designs and develops cyber systems so that they are resilient to a large set of quantifiable perturbations

  • 2) Resilience by reaction: This is the aspect that works at runtime when perturbations are incident on the cyber system and imbues the systems with the ability to “bounce back” quickly after a failure triggered by a perturbation

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Summary

INTRODUCTION

We lay out our vision for resilience in autonomous systems and our view of the short-term and mid-term research challenges to realize the vision. 2) Resilience by reaction: This is the aspect that works at runtime when perturbations are incident on the cyber system and imbues the systems with the ability to “bounce back” quickly after a failure triggered by a perturbation. We make specific the notion of perturbations that we want to deal with These take three forms: (i) natural failures of hardware or software (due to bugs, aging, misconfigurations, resource contentions in shared environments, downtime due to planned upgrades, etc.), (ii) maliciously induced failures or security attacks (from outside the system), and (iii) unexpected inputs (our target class of autonomous systems will have to deal with the physical environment and will interface with humans, which will produce unpredictable data to which the system will need to adapt).

AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS AS APPLICATION DRIVERS
COOPERATIVE AUTONOMOUS RESCUE WITH ACTIVE ADVERSARY
ATTACKS AGAINST BUILDING BLOCKS OF AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS Problem Context
RESILIENCE BY REACTION
APPROXIMATE COMPUTATION WITH RESILIENCE GUARANTEES Problem and Current State
ADAPTABILITY WITH RESILIENCE GUARANTEES Current State
THE ROAD AHEAD

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