Software Rejuvenation for Resilient, Secure, and Dependable Cyber-Physical UAV Systems

As autonomous UAV face increasing risks from cyber-attacks and software aging, countermeasures are mandatory. This paper proposes software rejuvenation as a mitigation strategy to UAV attack, providing a Generalized Stochastic Petri Net model and a tool to assess its effectiveness. By formalizing the stochastic competition between adversarial progression, represented by a Cyber Kill Chain attack process, and rejuvenation-based defense, we quantitatively evaluate the trade-offs between safety, availability, and security. Our analysis identifies optimal rejuvenation rates and policies that maximize system resilience while satisfying mission-critical constraints, providing a rigorous decision-making tool for securing resource-constrained edge nodes.