On Survivability of Mobile Cyber Physical Systems with Intrusion Detection

In this paper we address the survivability issue of a mobile cyber physical system (MCPS) comprising sensor-carried human actors, vehicles, or robots assembled together for executing a specific mission in battlefield or emergency response situations. We develop a mathematical model to assess the survivability property of a MCPS subject to energy exhaustion and security failure. Our model-based analysis reveals the optimal design setting for invoking intrusion detection to best balance energy conservation versus intrusion tolerance for achieving high survivability. We test the effectiveness of our approach with a dynamic voting-based intrusion detection technique leveraging sensing and ranging capabilities of mobile nodes in the MCPS and demonstrate its validity with simulation validation.