Real-Time Systems Security through Scheduler Constraints

Real-time systems (RTS) were typically considered to be invulnerable to external attacks, mainly due to their use of proprietary hardware and protocols, as well as physical isolation. As a result, RTS and security have traditionally been separate domains. These assumptions are being challenged by a series of recent events that highlight the vulnerabilities in RTS. In this paper we focus on integrating security as a first class principle in the design of RTS: we show that certain security requirements can be specified as real-time scheduling constraints. Using information leakage as a motivating problem, we illustrate our techniques with fixed-priority (FP) real-time schedulers. We evaluate our approach and discuss tradeoffs. Our evaluation shows that many real-time task sets can be scheduled under the proposed constraints without significant performance impact.