Trusted Mission Operation - Concept and Implementation

Small unmanned vehicles support many mission critical tasks. However, the provenance of these systems is usually not known, devices may be deployed in contested environments, and operators are often not computer system experts. Yet, the benefits of these systems outweigh the risks, and critical tasks and data are delegated to these systems without a sound basis for assessing trust. This paper describes an approach that can determine an operator’s trust in a mission system and applies continuous monitoring to indicate if the performance is within a trusted operating region. In an early prototype we (a) define a multi-dimensional trusted operating region for a given mission, (b) monitor the system in-mission, and (c) detect when anomalous effects put the mission at risk.