Tag Archives: dependability

Failure Prediction in the Internet of Things due to Memory Exhaustion

Rafiuzzaman M., Gascon-Samson J., Pattabiraman K., Gopalakrishnan S. (2019) Failure Prediction in the Internet of Things due to Memory Exhaustion. 34th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2019), Limassol, Cyprus
> Acceptance ratio: 27.5% [Preprint] [Presentation Slides]

Abstract: We present a technique to predict failures resulting from memory exhaustion in devices built for the modern Internet of Things (IoT). These devices can run general-purpose applications on the network edge for local data processing to reduce latency, bandwidth and infrastructure costs, and to address data safety and privacy concerns. Applications are, however, not optimized for all devices and could result in sudden and unexpected memory exhaustion failures because of limited available memory on those IoT devices. Proactive prediction of such failures, with sufficient lead time, allows for adaptation of the application or its safe termination. Our memory failure prediction technique for applications running on IoT devices uses k-Nearest-Neighbor (kNN) based machine learning models. We have evaluated our technique using two third-party applications and a real-world IoT simulation application on two different IoT platforms and on an Amazon EC2 t2.micro instance for both single and multitenancy use cases. Our results indicate that our technique significantly outperforms simpler threshold-based techniques: in our test applications, with 180 seconds of lead time, failures were accurately predicted with 88% recall at 74% precision for a single application failure and 76% recall at 71% precision for multitenancy failure.

ARTINALI: Dynamic Invariant Detection for Cyber-Physical System Security

Aliabadi, M., Kamath, A., Gascon-Samson, J., Pattabiraman, K. (2017) ARTINALI: Dynamic Invariant Detection for Cyber-Physical System Security, accepted / to be presented at ESEC/FSE 2017, Paderborn, Germany
> Acceptance ratio: 24% [Preprint] [Presentation Slides]

Abstract: Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSes) are being widely deployed in security critical scenarios such as smart homes and medical devices. Unfortunately, the connectedness of these systems and their relative lack of security measures makes them ripe targets for attacks. Specification-based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) have been shown to be effective for securing CPSs. Unfortunately, deriving invariants for capturing the specifications of CPS systems is a tedious and error-prone process. Therefore, it is important to dynamically monitor the CPS system to learn its common behaviors and formulate invariants for detecting security attacks. Existing techniques for invariant mining only incorporate data and events, but not time. However, time is central to most CPS systems, and hence incorporating time in addition to data and events, is essential for achieving low false positives and false negatives. This paper proposes ARTINALI, which mines dynamic system properties by incorporating time as a first-class property of the system. We build ARTINALI-based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSes) for two CPSes, namely smart meters and smart medical devices, and measure their efficacy. We find that the ARTINALI-based IDSes significantly reduce the ratio of false positives and false negatives by 16 to 48% (average 30.75%) and 89 to 95% (average 93.4%) respectively over other dynamic invariant detection tools.