Understanding and Formalizing Accountability for Cyber-Physical Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formal model for expressing accountability in cyber-physical systems, enabling clearer design, analysis, and comparison of accountability mechanisms across different interpretations.

Contribution

It provides a novel formal framework to specify and analyze accountability properties, addressing ambiguity in natural language definitions.

Findings

Formal model captures different accountability interpretations

Case study demonstrates implementation implications

Model clarifies design decisions and facilitates comparison

Abstract

Accountability is the property of a system that enables the uncovering of causes for events and helps understand who or what is responsible for these events. Definitions and interpretations of accountability differ; however, they are typically expressed in natural language that obscures design decisions and the impact on the overall system. This paper presents a formal model to express the accountability properties of cyber-physical systems. To illustrate the usefulness of our approach, we demonstrate how three different interpretations of accountability can be expressed using the proposed model and describe the implementation implications through a case study. This formal model can be used to highlight context specific-elements of accountability mechanisms, define their capabilities, and express different notions of accountability. In addition, it makes design decisions explicit and facilitates discussion, analysis and comparison of different approaches.