Architectural refinements for enhancing trust and securing cyber-physical systems

A cyber-physical system primarily defines the interaction of the physical world with a system built with components drawn from the computational, communication and control system domains. Existing security measures either target the sensor hardware or the control system software component to counter cyber attacks. In addition, the current set of security requirements are inadequate when transitioning from legacy electro-mechanical control systems to current smart large scale industrial Internet-of-Things (IoT) control systems. This paper focuses on the architectural enhancements for distributing the root-of-trust between both hardware and software components. This distribution of trust makes it difficult for a hardware-only or software-only attack to cripple the system. The proposed approach is applied to a motor control algorithm widely used in industrial IoT systems, consisting of third-party soft IP cores, where an attack on such a system can cripple it. The resulting implementation is evaluated by subjecting the system to multiple hardware Trojan attacks. In all the cases, the proposed approach proves to be resilient to the cyber attacks.