Work-in-Progress: Enabling secure boot for real-time restart-based cyber-physical systems

Abstract

Several cyber-physical systems use real-time restartbased embedded systems with the Simplex architecture to provide safety guarantees against system faults. Some approaches have been developed to protect such systems from security violations too, but none of these approaches can prevent an adversary from modifying the operating system or application code to execute an attack that persists even after a reboot. In this work, we present a secure boot mechanism to restore real-time restartbased embedded systems into a secure computing environment after every restart. We analyze the delay introduced by the proposed security feature and present preliminary results to demonstrate the viability of our approach using an open-source bootloader and real-time operating system.