TY - GEN
T1 - From High-Level Types to Low-Level Monitors
T2 - 18th International Symposium on NASA Formal Methods, NFM 2026
AU - Amorim, Arthur
AU - Gazzillo, Paul
AU - Taylor, Max
AU - Joneckis, Lance
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2026.
PY - 2026
Y1 - 2026
N2 - Standard communication protocols for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), such as MAVLink, lack the capability to enforce the contextual validity of message sequences. Autopilots therefore remain vulnerable to stealthy attacks, where syntactically correct but semantically ill-timed commands induce unsafe states without triggering physical anomaly detectors. Prior work (DATUM) demonstrated that global Refined Multiparty Session Types (RMPSTs) are an effective specification language for centralized MAVLink protocol enforcement, but suffered from two engineering failures: manual proof terms interleaved with protocol definitions, and an OCaml extraction backend whose managed runtime is incompatible with resource-constrained UAV hardware. We present Platum, a framework that addresses both failures with a minimal DSL requiring only the five semantic components of a global session type (sender, receiver, label, payload variable, refinement predicate), whose structural well-formedness conditions are confirmed via reflective decision procedures in Meta-F*. Confirmed specifications are compiled directly into flat, allocation-free C Finite State Machines (FSMs), deployed as centralized proxy monitors at the GCS/UAV communication boundary. Our evaluation demonstrates a 4× reduction in total monitor latency and lower memory overhead compared to DATUM, measured via ArduPilot SITL simulation.
AB - Standard communication protocols for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), such as MAVLink, lack the capability to enforce the contextual validity of message sequences. Autopilots therefore remain vulnerable to stealthy attacks, where syntactically correct but semantically ill-timed commands induce unsafe states without triggering physical anomaly detectors. Prior work (DATUM) demonstrated that global Refined Multiparty Session Types (RMPSTs) are an effective specification language for centralized MAVLink protocol enforcement, but suffered from two engineering failures: manual proof terms interleaved with protocol definitions, and an OCaml extraction backend whose managed runtime is incompatible with resource-constrained UAV hardware. We present Platum, a framework that addresses both failures with a minimal DSL requiring only the five semantic components of a global session type (sender, receiver, label, payload variable, refinement predicate), whose structural well-formedness conditions are confirmed via reflective decision procedures in Meta-F*. Confirmed specifications are compiled directly into flat, allocation-free C Finite State Machines (FSMs), deployed as centralized proxy monitors at the GCS/UAV communication boundary. Our evaluation demonstrates a 4× reduction in total monitor latency and lower memory overhead compared to DATUM, measured via ArduPilot SITL simulation.
KW - Formal Methods
KW - MAVLink
KW - Protocol Synthesis
KW - Runtime Verification
KW - Session Types
KW - UAV Security
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105042480401
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-032-28079-4_5
DO - 10.1007/978-3-032-28079-4_5
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:105042480401
SN - 9783032280787
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science
SP - 99
EP - 119
BT - NASA Formal Methods - 18th International Symposium, NFM 2026, Proceedings
A2 - Deshmukh, Jyotirmoy
A2 - Havelund, Klaus
A2 - Pinto, Alessandro
PB - Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Y2 - 5 May 2026 through 7 May 2026
ER -