Application-Aware Cyber-Resilience Framework for Embedded and Real-Time Systems (ACERS)

Navy unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs) must perform long-duration underwater missions and survive cyber-attacks without external support. During these missions, the UUV is exposed to external and embedded cyber threats. A successful cyber-attack can cause loss of the UUV and its sensitive information. Existing defenses must be complemented with new mechanisms to protect application-level software processes because application software components typically perform real-time navigation and access mission-critical information. Application defenses against cyber-attacks must be built into the system before deployment to autonomously protect the system from compromise while external communications are unavailable. To meet these requirements, we plan to design and evaluate the feasibility of an Application-Aware Cyber-Resilience Framework for Embedded and Real-Time Systems (ACERS), which will monitor application-specific state and events to protect mission-critical UUV systems against cyber threats. To accomplish this, we will: (1) design an efficient OS-level monitoring infrastructure that collects and analyzes both state- and event-related application data to detect external, embedded, and unknown cyber-attacks in real time; (2) design a real-time, autonomous cyber-responder module that automatically mitigates detected cyber threats; and (3) provide a feasibility analysis of the ACERS approach.