Detection and Defense Strategies against Attacks on an Artificial Hormone System Running on a Mixed Signal Chip

The Artificial Hormone System (AHS) is a self organizing system which allocates tasks to processing elements. It works in a distributed way, is able to hold real-time conditions and can run in a mixed-signal chip environment significantly increasing system reliability. Yet the hormone mechanisms offer new ways for malicious attacks which can affect the correct functioning of the AHS. Such attacks may cause severe damage if the AHS is used in an embedded (maybe real-time) environment. Therefore, this paper deals with analyzing malicious attacks on the AHS. We present several ways of attacking the AHS and resulting detection and defense strategies. We also evaluate these strategies in the paper and demonstrate that they can help to protect the AHS from attacks.