Protecting Actuators in Safety-Critical IoT Systems from Control Spoofing Attacks

TL;DR

This paper introduces Contego-TEE, a framework leveraging trusted computing to protect IoT actuators from control spoofing attacks, ensuring safety in real-time systems like robotic vehicles.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel framework using commodity trusted hardware and invariant checking to secure IoT actuators against malicious control signals.

Findings

Feasibility demonstrated on ARM-based robotic platform

Effective protection against control spoofing attacks

Prototype implementation using embedded Linux

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a framework called Contego-TEE to secure Internet-of-Things (IoT) edge devices with timing requirements from control spoofing attacks where an adversary sends malicious control signals to the actuators. We use a trusted computing base available in commodity processors (such as ARM TrustZone) and propose an invariant checking mechanism to ensure the security and safety of the physical system. A working prototype of Contego-TEE was developed using embedded Linux kernel. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach for a robotic vehicle running on an ARM-based platform.