The DoD recognizes the need to field new cyber-physical systems (CPS) capabilities at an increasingly rapid pace, which is why it maintains a number of initiatives on rapid deployment. The demand for more rapid deployment, however, creates a need for verification techniques that can adapt to a faster deployment cadence, especially for CPS that are too big for traditional verification techniques and/or involve unpredictable aspects, such as machine learning.

The goal of Rapid Certifiable Trust is to reduce the deployment time of CPS by reducing the overall development and assurance times. We will do this by enabling the use of unverified commodity software components (e.g., open source drone piloting software) guarded by verified enforcers that guarantee the containment of unsafe component behavior. We are developing compositional verification techniques to allow us to use multiple enforced components minimizing and automatically removing conflicting enforcer assumptions (e.g., reducing a plane’s airspeed to avoid a crash while increasing airspeed to prevent stalling). These techniques will allow us to assure full-scale systems, even if most of their functionality is implemented by unverified components.