Exploring Opportunistic Execution for Integrating Security into Legacy Hard Real-Time Systems

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to enhance security in legacy hard real-time systems by combining opportunistic execution with hierarchical scheduling, maintaining system constraints while improving security.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach that integrates security mechanisms into legacy RTS using opportunistic execution and hierarchical scheduling, ensuring compatibility and security enhancement.

Findings

Increased security posture without affecting temporal constraints

Effective metric for measuring security mechanism performance

Compatibility with legacy systems demonstrated

Abstract

Due to physical isolation as well as use of proprietary hardware and protocols, traditional real-time systems (RTS) were considered to be invulnerable to security breaches and external attacks. However, this assumption is being challenged by recent attacks that highlight the vulnerabilities in such systems. In this paper, we focus on integrating security mechanisms into RTS (especially legacy RTS) and provide a metric to measure the effectiveness of such mechanisms. We combine opportunistic execution with hierarchical scheduling to maintain compatibility with legacy systems while still providing flexibility. The proposed approach is shown to increase the security posture of RTS systems without impacting their temporal constraints.