Attack-Detection and -Recovery: An Integrated Approach Towards Attack-Tolerant Cyber-Physical Digital Microfluidic Biochips

Abstract

A digital microfluidic biochip (DMFB) with cyber-physical adaptation implements complex bio-protocols with high precision and high throughput dealing with safety-critical applications including point-of-care diagnosis, personalized medicine, and drug development. Having integrated sensors with network connectivity, a cyber-physical DMFB is undeniably susceptible to attacks. A number of leading research works are carried out to assess various attacks and their impacts. Several defense mechanisms are developed by arranging on-chip monitoring systems through deployment of checkpoints. As checkpoints are external resources imposing a cost-overhead to the system, a cost-effective detection mechanism is of utmost importance. Moreover, after detecting an attack, an efficient recovery process is imperative to execute the associated bioassay in a vulnerable environment. Here, an attack-tolerant synthesis is proposed with two-way security through integrating attack-detection and attack-recovery from various Denial of Service attacks. Moreover, a selective re-synthesis approach has been introduced to allow multiple recovery steps to be executed simultaneously on the biochip. The recovery strategy is closely coupled with the detection process which makes the system adaptive towards attack-tolerance. Experimental results on several benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed two-way attack-tolerance strategy.

KEYWORDS:

• Attack-recovery
• Attack-tolerant
• Checkpoint
• Cyber-physical
• Microfluidics
• Security

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Piyali Datta

Piyali Datta received BSc, BTech, and MTech degrees in 2010, 2013, and 2015, respectively, from the University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India. She received her PhD degree (2022) in computer science and engineering from University of Calcutta. Presently, she is working as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Heritage Institute of Technology, Kolkata, India. Her current research interests include microfluidics, algorithms, VLSI design, machine learning, etc. She has published more than 40 technical research articles.

Arpan Chakraborty

Arpan Chakraborty received BSc, BTech, and MTech degrees in 2010, 2013, and 2015, respectively, from the University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India. He received the PhD degree (2021) in computer science and engineering from University of Calcutta under the Visvesvaraya fellowship grant, MHRD, Government of India. Currently, he is doing research in cyber-security, synthesis of digital microfluidic biochips, VLSI design automation, and so on. He has more than 40 publications in international journals and conference proceedings. Email: [email protected]

Rajat Kumar Pal

Rajat Kumar Pal received BE degree in electrical engineering from the Bengal Engineering College, Shibpur University of Calcutta, India, and the MTech degree in computer science and engineering from the University of Calcutta, India in 1985 and 1988, respectively. He received PhD degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, India in 1996. Presently, he is working as a professor with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Calcutta, India. He holds several international patents and his research interests include VLSI design, graph theory, logic synthesis, computational geometry, etc. He has published more than 200 technical research articles. Email: [email protected]