Future Proofing of ICT Trust Chains: Sustainable Operational Assurance and Verification Remote Guards for Systems-of-Systems Security and Privacy

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ASSURED’s vision is to introduce a ground-breaking policy-driven, formally verified, runtime assurance framework in the complex CPS domain. As the demand for increasingly autonomous CPSs grows, so does the need for certification mechanisms to ensure their safety. Current methods towards software and system validation requires exhaustive offline testing of every possible state scenario PRIOR to fielding the system. In this context, novel assurance services ensure that the control output of such controllers does not put the system or people interacting with it in danger, especially in safety-critical applications as the ones envisaged in the ASSURED Demonstrators. ASSURED leverages and enhances runtime property-based attestation and verification techniques to allow intelligent (unverified) controllers to perform within a predetermined envelope of acceptable behaviour, and a risk management approach to extend this to a larger SoS. ASSURED elaborates over the coordination of deployed TEE agents in horizontal scope, encompassing numerous technologies applicable to everything from edge devices to gateways in the cloud. Such technologies DICE for binding devices to firmware/software, trusted execution environments, formal modelling of protocols and software processes, software attestation, blockchain technology for distributed verification of transactions between system elements and control-flow attestation techniques for enhancing the operational correctness of such devices. In this frame, we consider the mutual verification of system components in distributed multi-operator environments. Our approach ensures a smooth transition and advancement beyond current strategies where security management services are considered in an isolated manner relying on traditional perimeter security and forensics in a “catch-and-patch” fashion without dwelling on the safety of the overall network as a whole, to holistic network security services capable of minimizing attack surfaces.