2016 Reports

YOLO: A New Security Architecture for Cyber Physical Systems

Arroyo, Miguel; Weisz, Jonathan; Sethumadhavan, Simha; Kobayashi, Hidenori; Yang, Junfeng

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are defined by their unique characteristics involving both the cyber and physical domains. Their hybrid nature introduces new attack vectors but also provides an opportunity to design new security architectures. In this work, we present YOLO—You Only Live Once—a security architecture that leverages two unique physical properties of a CPS: inertia, the tendency of objects to stay at rest or in motion, and its built-in reliability to intermittent faults to survive CPS attacks. At a high level, YOLO aims to use a new diversified variant for every new sensor input to the CPS. The delays involved in YOLO, including the delays for rebooting and diversification, are easily absorbed by the CPS because of inherent inertia and the ability to withstand minor perturbations. We implement YOLO on an open-source car engine control unit and, with measurements from a real race car engine, show that YOLO is imminently practical.

Keywords: CPS; Security; Diversification; Reboot