Cyber First Aid for Self-Governing Systems
The Self-Healing Systems Challenge
Modern cyber threats evolve faster than traditional defenses can respond. Self-healing systems offer a paradigm shift—autonomous detection, mitigation, and recovery from cyberattacks in real-time. When properly implemented, they enhance cyber-resilience, reduce operational risks, minimize downtime, and ensure mission continuity even under persistent threats.
Self-healing cybersecurity is now a critical capability for:
- Defense & Aerospace – Ensuring mission-critical assets can stay in the fight.
- Critical Infrastructure – Protecting remote infrastructure to reduce financial and societal impacts of cyber attacks.
- Autonomous Systems – Enabling continuous, adaptive security in edge environments.
The Hidden Gaps in Cyber Resilience
Current cybersecurity strategies rely on reactive defenses—patching after exposure, incident response after compromise. This leaves critical gaps, including:
- Zero-day attacks that exploit unknown vulnerabilities before fixes exist.
- Software supply chain compromises that introduce hidden backdoors.
- Mission-critical systems that can’t reboot, making traditional patching impossible.
URSA’s Solution: Cyber Resilience That Fights Back
Unlike traditional cybersecurity, URSA’s self-healing system doesn’t just detect attacks—it neutralizes them in real time.
- Autonomous anomaly detection – Identifies and isolates cyber threats at machine speed.
- Self-patching in memory – Deploys fixes without downtime or reboots.
- Hardware-agnostic binary analysis – Strengthens security across diverse architectures.
- Proactive threat mitigation – Stops attacks before they cause mission failure.
Whether securing defense assets, critical infrastructure, or autonomous systems, URSA delivers true self-healing cyber resilience—because survival shouldn’t depend on a human-in-the-loop response.
Technical Details
Product Name: TBD
Technical Readiness Level: 3
Description:
Autonomously detects abnormal system behavior in real time, identifies compromised functions, and applies targeted patches—either in memory or on disk—without requiring a reboot or human intervention.
Proof of Concept:
Autonomously detected compromise in a pacemaker, analyzed problem, and created, verified, and applied the patch in under 20 seconds.
Key points:
- Real-time binary analysis and modification using micro language models.
- Formal methods act as a governor, validating the safety and correctness of generated patches.
- Lightweight instrumentation and behavioral analysis isolate functional deviations and likely compromises.
- Supports in-memory patching for systems that cannot reboot, ensuring mission continuity.
- Built for contested, disconnected, or operator-limited environments.
Technology: Integrates lightweight instrumentation with compact, domain-specific language models to identify and remediate behavioral deviations in software binaries. Formal methods enforce safety constraints, ensuring only trusted, validated patches are deployed—making the system both autonomous and resilient under attack.
Delivery: Initially offered via custom integration with a clear path toward a Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) for broader adoption and rapid deployment.
Future Work: Expand formal validation coverage, enhance language model performance, and fully align with MOSA standards.
Use Cases: Ideal for edge, embedded, and autonomous systems operating in high-risk, low-connectivity environments.
“This research was developed with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The views, opinions and/or findings expressed are those of the author and should not be interpreted as representing the official views or policies of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.”