Towards Automated Threat Modeling of Cyber-Physical Systems

Thumbnail Image
Date
2021-01-01
Authors
Jamil, Ameerah-Muhsinah
Khan, Shifa
Lee, Jian Kai
ben Othmane, Lotfi
Major Professor
Advisor
Committee Member
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Authors
Person
Ben Othmane, Lotfi
Assistant Teaching Professor
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Is Version Of
Versions
Series
Department
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Abstract

Cyber-Physical System (CPS) seamlessly integrates the computation, communication, and physical components of the system. Often, a CPS controls physical objects through computation and communication and uses of real-time feedback. Threat models of such systems must consider their hardware, network, infrastructure, software, and human aspects and the interactions of these aspects. Commonly, threat modeling of such systems is based on the given system’s architecture. In terms of components and interactions among these components, the architecture of a given CPS may change over time, making the threat model of the CPS rapidly obsolete–i.e., incomplete and invalid threat model. This paper poses the question: Can we automate threat modeling of a given CPS? A positive answer to the question helps to implement continuous up-to-date security assessments of CPSs–for different versions of the given system. It presents an approach to maintain the threat model of given CPSs up-to-date and reports about applying the proposed approach on Apollo Auto 3.5, an autonomous vehicle software. Unfortunately, the scalability limitation of the used architecture recovery technique prevents the recovering the Apollo Auto architecture and, consequently, the automated identification of the system’s threat model.

Comments

This is a manuscript of a proceeding published as Jamil, Ameerah-Muhsinah, Shifa Khan, Jian Kai Lee, and Lotfi ben Othmane. "Towards Automated Threat Modeling of Cyber-Physical Systems," 7th International Conference on Software Engineering & Computer Systems (ICSECS), IEEE, Pekan, Malaysia, 2021. Posted with permission.

Description
Keywords
Citation
DOI
Source
Copyright
Fri Jan 01 00:00:00 UTC 2021