Towards trustworthy shared networked sensor-actuator systems

  • Authors:
  • Ramy Eltarras;Mohamed Eltoweissy;Stephan Olariu;Ing-Ray Chen

  • Affiliations:
  • Virginia Tech;Pacific Northwest National Laboratory;Dominion University;Virginia Tech

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Workshop on Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Research
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

We are witnessing a rapid expansion in the adoption of networked sensor-actuator systems (NSAS) deployed in support of applications such as smart homes, health management, public safety, and emergency management. Many of these emerging applications require large-scale deployment of NSAS and often have dynamic application-specific mission and evolving quality-of-service (QoS) requirements that include timeliness, reliability, security and availability. The shared and federated use of NSAS resources, to achieve multi-application goals, is a key to cost effective NSAS industry. This necessitates the decoupling of the NSAS physical infrastructure from application provisioning, and protecting applications and infrastructure resources from threats. The failure of NSAS nodes, due to malicious or non-malicious conditions, represents a major threat to the turstworthiness of NSAS platforms. Applications should be able to survive individual failures of resource nodes and change their runtime structure while preserving its operational integrity. Furthermore, for sustainable operation, QoS provisioning must be interwoven with energy conservation as a core priority in NSAS platform design. The large-scale of such networks, their heterogeneous node capabilities, their highly dynamic topology, their resource challenged nodes with the subsequent need for node cooperation, and their likelihood of being deployed in inhospitable environments, pose formidable challenges for the construction of trustworthy, shared NSAS platforms. To support the transition of NSAS from a research-only topic to a cost-efficient commercial industry that brings NSAS products and technologies to market, there is a need for a system-aided engineering methodologies and processes that addresses the industrial activities required for the full life-cycle of NSAS applications starting from the initial design to the evolution as requirements or mission change.