Beyond just safety: Delay-aware security monitoring for real-time control systems

Abstract

Modern embedded real-time systems (RTS) are increasingly facing more security threats than the past. A simplistic straightforward integration of security mechanisms might not be able to guarantee the safety and predictability of such systems. In this article, we focus on integrating security mechanisms into RTS (especially legacy RTS). We introduce Contego-C, an analytical model to integrate security tasks into RTS that will allow system designers to improve the security posture without affecting temporal and control constraints of the existing real-time control tasks. We also define a metric (named tightness of periodic monitoring) to measure the effectiveness of such integration. We demonstrate our ideas using a proof-of-concept implementation on an ARM-based rover platform and show that Contego-C can improve security without degrading control performance.