Security Modeling of Autonomous Systems: A Survey

Autonomous systems will soon be integrating into our lives as home assistants, delivery drones, and driverless cars. The implementation of the level of automation in these systems from being manually controlled to fully autonomous would depend upon the autonomy approach chosen to design these systems. This article reviews the historical evolution of autonomy, its approaches, and the current trends in related fields to build robust autonomous systems. Toward such a goal and with the increased number of cyberattacks, the security of these systems needs special attention from the research community. To gauge the extent to which research has been done in this area, we discuss the cybersecurity of these systems. It is essential to model the system from a security perspective, identify the threats and vulnerabilities, and then model the attacks. A survey in this direction explores the theoretical/analytical system and attack models that have been proposed over the years and identifies the research gap that needs to be addressed by the research community.