Chameleon: Recovering Cyber-Physical Systems from Memory Corruption Attacks via ML Surrogates

2026-07-01

AI Summary

This work addresses the limitations of traditional memory corruption defenses, which often rely on system termination or reboot and thus fail to meet the stringent availability requirements of safety-critical cyber-physical systems (CPS). To enable continuous operation under attack, the authors propose Chameleon, a novel framework that, for the first time, leverages memory-safe machine learning (ML) agents to dynamically replace compromised components at fine-grained module granularity, achieving seamless behavioral recovery. Built on LLVM, Chameleon integrates ML-based agent modeling, memory-safety isolation, and real-time attack response mechanisms. Evaluations on seven robotic vehicles demonstrate that the ML agents achieve an average R² of 0.96, effectively mitigating real-world memory corruption attacks while significantly outperforming existing approaches in task completion rates with low runtime overhead.

Abstract

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are increasingly deployed in every aspect of our lives and can be compromised through memory corruption vulnerabilities, allowing attackers to hijack the control flow and take over the system. Existing techniques mostly focus on detecting such attacks but respond by terminating or halting execution upon attack detection, which is not acceptable in CPSs used in safety-critical tasks, as interrupted tasks can have catastrophic consequences. Other techniques replace compromised CPS components with simplified defaults that degrade system behavior, or reboot the system upon attack detection. We propose Chameleon, a novel framework for automatically recovering CPSs from memory corruption attacks using machine learning (ML)-based surrogates trained at compartment granularity that nearly replicate their original compartments' behavior but do not have the same memory corruption vulnerabilities. Upon attack detection, Chameleon replaces the compromised compartment with its trained surrogate. We implemented Chameleon using the LLVM compiler and evaluated its efficiency and effectiveness on seven different robotic vehicles (RVs), including simulated and real ones. We found that Chameleon can generate surrogates that closely approximate the original compartments (with an average R$^2$=0.96), successfully recover the system despite real-world memory corruption attacks unlike prior approaches, and complete their tasks while incurring low performance and memory overhead.

Problem

• Cyber-Physical Systems
• Memory Corruption Attacks
• System Recovery
• Safety-Critical Tasks
• Attack Resilience

Innovation

• ML surrogates
• memory corruption recovery
• cyber-physical systems
• compartment granularity
• automatic recovery