SoK: Security in Real-Time Systems

Abstract

Security is an increasing concern for real-time systems (RTS). Over the last decade or so, researchers have demonstrated attacks and defenses aimed at such systems. In this article, we identify, classify and measure the effectiveness of the security research in this domain. We provide a high-level summary [identification] and a taxonomy [classification] of this existing body of work. Furthermore, we carry out an in-depth analysis [measurement] of scheduler-based security techniques — the most common class of real-time security mechanisms. For this purpose, we developed a common metric, “attacker’s burden”, used to measure the effectiveness of (existing as well as future) scheduler-based real-time security measures. This metric, built on the concept of “work factor” [1], is adapted for, and normalized across, various scheduler-based real-time security techniques.