Prognostics and Secure Health Management (PSHM) of Electronic Systems in Zero-Trust Environment

The Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) of electronic systems has reached high levels of maturity, with both generic and system-specific PHM techniques available. While these techniques are able to detect naturally occurring faults and predict their impact on the system lifetime, they might not be able to do so if the faults are maliciously induced. Maliciously induced faults could be due to hardware threats; i.e., electronic products that are recycled, remarked, defective, cloned, or tampered (through the insertion of hardware trojans). Increased outsourcing in the fabrication of electronic products has made them susceptible to the insertion of hardware threats in untrusted manufacturing facilities. In many cases, hardware threats are more destructive than software ones as they cannot be remedied by a software patch and are difficult to remove. Hardware threats can cause undesired system behavior such as information leakage, functional failure, maliciously induced aging, etc. The proliferation of hardware threats could outpace the implementation of their detection mechanisms. This might lead to a scenario where all products manufactured by untrusted manufacturing facilities are suspect until verified otherwise. This has parallels to Zero-Trust Architecture, a network security concept developed to help prevent data breaches by removing the notion of trust from an organization's network architecture. To extend the concept of Zero-Trust Architecture from the network to the hardware domain and to ensure hardware security, a paradigm shift from PHM to PSHM (Prognostics and Secure Health Management) is needed. This paper lays out a compelling case for the need for this shift and how the PHM community can adapt its research to ensure the safe, reliable, and secure operation of systems in this challenging new environment.