Let’s Get Cyber-Physical: Validation of Safety-Critical Cyber-Physical Systems

Advancements in technology are propelling Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) into crucial roles across various sectors, implying the need for stricter CPS safety and security measures as their deployment in safety-critical scenarios increases. Physical-to-cyber attacks are particularly alarming among emerging threats, targeting sensors and exposing significant vulnerabilities in CPS due to the inadequacy of current protection mechanisms. The development landscape for CPS also reveals other gaps such as the insufficiency of analog fault coverage and validation, and the threat of covert malicious circuit alterations by third-party outsourcing. This paper seeks to draw the scientific community’s attention to these topics from a unified perspective, presenting the main issues in the development of safety-critical CPS, along with a survey of related subjects. Subsequently, these topics are formally bridged with the introduction of this paper’s main contribution: the concept of Hardware Integrity Threats (HITs). This finding suggests that the community can develop countermeasures that are effective across the spectrum of these threats, which led to the formulation of two environment proposals to explore these design spaces. Our proposals incorporate co-simulation and simulation with Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) taking these safety and security validation concerns into account, as the exploration of these designs mostly entails hybrid analog hardware/software solutions.