Systems design of cybersecurity in embedded systems

Mission critical embedded systems should be capable of performing intended functions with resiliency against cyberattacks. The methodology of design-for-cybersecurity is now widely recognized, in which the effects of cybersecurity, or lack thereof, on system objectives must be determined. However, developers are often challenged by the difficulty of analyzing a system-under-design without complete specifics. In this paper, we describe a systems design approach, which incrementally models the cybersecurity architecture, components, and interfaces of an embedded system for analysis and demonstration. We have applied this approach to analyze the mission resiliency of an avionic computer being developed and demonstrate its operations in a scenario when the system is under attack.