Accountability in cyber-physical systems

Abstract

Our position is that a key component of securing cyber-physical systems (CPS) is to develop a theory of accountability that encompasses both control and computing systems. We envision that a unified theory of accountability in CPS can be built on a foundation of causal information flow analysis. This theory will support design and analysis of mechanisms at various stages of the accountability regime: attack detection, responsibility-assignment (e.g., attack identification or localization), and corrective measures (e.g., via resilient control) As an initial step in this direction, we summarize our results on attack detection in control systems. We use the Kullback-Liebler (KL) divergence as a causal information flow measure. We then recover, using information flow analyses, a set of existing results in the literature that were previously proved using different techniques. These results cover passive detection, stealthy attack characterization, and active detection. This research direction is related to recent work on accountability in computational systems [1], [2], [3], [4]. We envision that by casting accountability theories in computing and control systems in terms of causal information flow, we can provide a common foundation to develop a theory for CPS that compose elements from both domains.