Research Strand 1:
Securing the AS “Usage” Environment

The objective of RS1 is to establish the fundamental AS “Usage” framework for providing and assessing multi-layered, multi- dimensional adaptive AS security in dynamic mixed mode environments (MME).

The activities of RS1 are conducted over the two themes below: 

RS1-Theme A: Dynamic and Compositional AS Security. N. Suri (lead),A. TsourdosG. Inalhan, A. Sogokon

The research addresses the fundamental challenges of specifying AS interfaces and the emergent security properties over compositions across AS and/or with the environment and, especially adaptivity that characterizes AS operations.

Our intent is to develop a conceptual framework characterising the relationships across security attributes and the role of collaborative, disruptive and scalable security composition in AS, along with a run-time security policy framework for AS.

RS1-Theme B: Explainable & Verifiable Decision Making for AS Security P. Angelov (lead), N. SuriW. GuoG. Inalhan, Z. Yu, A. Sogokon, E. Soares.

Two research challenges will be addressed. First, the control behaviour of an AS is often non-deterministic as an AS adapts to changes in the operational environment, resources, sensory streams and objectives to yield an “optimal” solution. This nondeterminism makes verification of the security attributes unviable by classical testing and verification approaches that, typically, verify a given static property. This is a standalone challenge as autonomy, usually, results in non-deterministic outcomes unable to support reproducibility of scenarios and results. Second, AS operate on data streams from sensory inputs for analysing data related to the mission, situation awareness, the navigation, and control. This results in the use of data-driven reasoning techniques.

Our intent is to develop dynamic verification methodologies, explainable-by-design DL architectures that lend themselves to reasoning interpretation as well as to visualization, and symbolic surrogate models for DL-based automation reasoning techniques.