Adlp: Accountable Data Logging Protocol For Publish-Subscribe Communication Systems

Reasoning about the decision-making process of modern autonomous systems becomes increasingly challenging as their software systems become more inexplicable due to complex data-driven processes. Yet, logs of data production and consumption among the software components can provide useful run-time evidence to analyze and diagnose faulty operations. Particularly when the system is run by a number of software components that were individually developed by different parties (e.g., open source, third-party vendor), it is imperative to find out where the problems originated and thus who should be responsible for the problems. However, software components may act unfaithfully or non-cooperatively to make the run-time evidence refutable or unusable. Hence, this paper presents Accountable Data Logging Protocol (ADLP), a mechanism to build accountability into data distribution among software components that are not necessarily cooperative or faithful in reporting the logs of their data production and consumption. We demonstrate an application of ADLP to a miniaturized self-driving car and show that it can be used in practice with at a moderate performance cost.