Design and Operation of Secure Cyber-Physical Systems

This letter proposes a holistic framework for the design and operation of secure and reliable resource-constrained cyber-physical systems. The proposed framework combines control-theoretic methods, information security notions and computational models to characterize tradeoffs among different design and operation objectives. We quantify the intricate relation among control performance, system security and platform schedulability through a minimal set of interface variables. We argue that security mechanisms and control algorithms need to be codesigned and comanaged with the embedded platform, so as to avoid the design of algorithms that are too expensive to implement on the embedded platform, or significantly impede design objectives such as performance and timing robustness.