Enforcing MAVLink Safety & Security Properties Via Refined Multiparty Session Types

Abstract

A compromised system component can issue message sequences that are legal while also leading the overall system into unsafe states. Such stealthy attacks are challenging to characterize, because message interfaces in standard languages specify each individual message separately but do not specify safe sequences of messages. We present initial results from ongoing work applying refined multiparty session types as a mechanism for expressing and enforcing proper message usage to exclude unsafe sequences. We illustrate our approach by using refined multiparty session types to mitigate safety and security issues in the MAVLink protocol commonly used in UAVs.