Software control and intellectual property protection in cyber-physical systems

Software control is a critical issue in cyber-physical systems (CPS): if the expected behavior of the software embedded in a single device of a CPS cannot be enforced then the behavior of the whole CPS may be in jeopardy. Thus, CPS stakeholders like having some level of control over the embedded software. Third-party demands to control the software, however, conflict with the intellectual property protection demanded by software developers, since some level of detail about the software at hand would have to be disclosed. In the present paper we discuss the issue of controlling the software embedded in CPS devices and address the problem of how to achieve an increased level of software control without compromising the protection of intellectual property. We propose a two-party fingerprinting scheme that allows for attribution of responsibility in the case of intellectual property leaks. Our fingerprinting scheme is such that neither party may obtain an advantage over the other by misbehaving, misrepresenting or by prematurely aborting the protocol, therefore providing a fair means to resolve disputes. A preliminary version of this paper has been published in the Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES’2015), pp. 110– 119. Research partially supported by FAPERJ, Capes and CNPq. Raphael C. S. Machado Instituto Nacional de Metrologia, Qualidade e Tecnologia Davidson R. Boccardo Instituto Nacional de Metrologia, Qualidade e Tecnologia Vińıcius G. Pereira de Sá Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro Jayme L. Szwarcfiter Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro 2 Raphael C. S. Machado et al.