START: A Framework for Trusted and Resilient Autonomous Vehicles (Practical Experience Report)

From delivering groceries and vital medical supplies to driving trucks and passenger vehicles, society is becoming increasingly reliant on autonomous vehicles (AVs), It is therefore vital that these systems be resilient to adversarial actions, perform mission-critical functions despite known and unknown vulnerabilities, and protect and repair themselves during or after operational failures and cyber-attacks. While techniques have been proposed to address individual aspects of software resilience, vulnerability assessment, automated repair, and invariant detection, there is no approach that provides end-to-end trusted and resilient mission operation and repair on AVs. In this paper, we describe our experience of building START,1 a framework that provides increased resilience, accurate vul-nerability assessment, and trustworthy post-repair operation in autonomous vehicles. We combine techniques from binary analysis and rewriting, runtime monitoring and verification, auto-mated program repair, and invariant detection that cooperatively detect and eliminate a swath of software security vulnerabilities in cyberphysical systems. We evaluate our framework using an autonomous vehicle simulation platform, demonstrating its holistic applicability to AVs.