Authors:
Carlos Moreno
and
Sebastian Fischmeister
Affiliation:
University of Waterloo, Canada
Keyword(s):
Embedded Systems Security, Physical Unclonable Functions, Safety-critical Systems, Runtime Monitoring.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Internet Technology
;
Intrusion Detection and Response
;
Web Information Systems and Technologies
Abstract:
The increased level of connectivity makes security an essential aspect to ensure that safety-critical embedded
systems deliver the level of safety for which they were designed. However, embedded systems designers
face unique technological and economics challenges when incorporating security into their products. In this
paper, we focus on two of these challenges unique to embedded systems, and propose novel approaches to
address them. We first deal with the difficulties in successfully implementing runtime monitoring to ensure
correctness in the presence of security threats. We highlight the necessity to implement runtime monitors as
physically isolated subsystems, preferably with no (direct) connectivity, and we propose the use of program
tracing through power consumption to this end. A second critical aspect is that of remote firmware upgrades:
this is an essential mechanism to ensure the continuing security of a system, yet the mechanism itself can
introduce severe security vulnera
bilities. We propose a novel approach to ensure secure remote upgrades
and sketch the details of an eventual implementation. It is our goal and hope that the computer security and
embedded systems communities will discuss and evaluate the ideas that we present in this paper, to assess
their effectiveness and applicability in practice.
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