Detect & Adapt: A Resiliency Enhancement Mechanism for Space Computing Platforms

Over the years, space systems have evolved considerably to provide high-quality services for demanding applications such as navigation, communication, and weather forecast. Modern space systems rely on extremely fast commercially available off-the-shelf (COTS) processing units, with built-in GPU, DSP, and FPGA in light-weight, energy-efficient hardware. Since such devices are not necessarily designed with security features as a priority, there must be an adaptive controller to protect this mission-critical space system from potential malicious attacks, such as memory leaks, packet drops, algorithmic trojans, and so on. These attacks can lead the system to substantial inefficiency or complete failure. Considering the hardware diversity in current space systems, we propose a framework to explore both diversity and redundancy not only of hardware but also of software to make the overall system fault-tolerant. Our approach deploys mechanisms for monitoring and orchestrating actions of redundancy, diversity, and randomization to render the system resilient unpredictably dynamic, and optimize efficiency as much as possible during abnormalities. Yet, we use rule-based and adaptive engines to keep track of the various computing units to learn the best strategies to take when the system is under attack. The robustness of our approach lies in the fact that it makes the system highly unpredictable to potential attackers and tolerates attacks to some extent, which is crucial for any mission-critical application.