Real-time computing systems are those that are designed to achieve computing goals by certain deadlines. Real-time computing systems are present in everything from cars to airplanes, pacemakers to industrial-control systems, and other pieces of critical infrastructure. With the increasing interconnectivity of these systems, system security issues and the constant threat of manipulation by malicious external attackers that have plagued general computing systems, now threaten the integrity and safety of real-time systems. This dissertation discusses three different defense techniques that focuses on the role that real-time scheduling theory can play to reduce runtime cost, and guarantee correctness when applying these defense strategies to real-time systems. The first work introduces a novel timing aware defense strategy for the CAN bus that utilizes TrustZone on state-of-the-art ARMv8-M microcontrollers. The second reduces the runtime cost of control-flow integrity (CFI), a popular system security defense technique, by correctly modeling when a real-time system performs I/O, and exploiting the model to schedule CFI procedures efficiently. Finally, the third studies and provides a lightweight mitigation strategy for a recently discovered vulnerability within mixed criticality real-time systems. / Doctor of Philosophy / Real-time computing systems are those that are designed to achieve computing goals within certain timing constraints. Real-time computing systems are present in everything from cars to airplanes, pacemakers to industrial-control systems, and other pieces of critical infrastructure. With the increasing interconnectivity of these systems, system security issues and the constant threat of manipulation by malicious external attackers that have plagued general computing systems, now threaten the integrity and safety of real-time systems. This dissertation discusses three different defense techniques that focuses on the role that real-time scheduling theory can play to reduce runtime cost, and guarantee correctness when applying these defense strategies to real-time systems.
The first work introduces a novel timing aware defense strategy for the Controller Area Network (CAN). CAN is a popular communication system that is at the heart of every modern passenger vehicle and is indispensable for the safe operation of various components such as the engine and transmission systems, and due to its simplicity, may be vulnerable to a variety of attacks. We leverage security advancements in modern processor design to provide a lightweight and predictable (in terms of time taken to perform the operation) defense technique for some of these vulnerabilities.
The second work applies a technique called Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) to real-time systems. CFI is a general-purpose defense technique to prevent attackers from modifying software execution, and applying such techniques to real-time systems, particularly those with limited hardware capabilities, may be infeasible. By applying real-time scheduling theory, we propose a strategy to apply CFI to such systems, while reducing its overhead, or cost, without compromising the security guarantees CFI inherently provides.
Finally, safety-critical systems may consist of a mix of operations, each having a different level of importance (criticality) with respect to the safe operation of the system. However, due to the complexity of modeling such systems, the models themselves may be vulnerable to attacks. Through simulations we study one such vulnerability and propose a modification to mitigate it.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/109806 |
| Date | 04 May 2022 |
| Creators | Mishra, Tanmaya |
| Contributors | Electrical and Computer Engineering, Chantem, Thidapat, Tilevich, Eli, Zhang, Ning, Gerdes, Ryan M., Yu, Guoqiang |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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