RT-POD: A Framework for Real-Time Systems Participation in Own Defense

Abstract

As mission-critical distributed real-time and embedded systems have become more prevalent and are increasingly developed and deployed using an open-systems model, their potential exposure to adversarial attack has increased as well. Furthermore, real-time constraints in such systems add further vulnerabilities to attack, where an adversary need only interfere with the timing of events in a system, rather than having to modify the events themselves. To address this challenge, it is necessary to examine fundamental relationships between real-time and security properties, and to provide a system infrastructure framework designed to mitigate or even avoid the consequences of adversarial attack in real-time systems. This paper makes two main contributions to the state of the art in security for real-time systems. First, it describes particular vulnerabilities of real-time systems to denial-of-service attacks, and categorizes those attacks according to the kind of attack and the mechanisms it affects. Second, it describes the design of RT-POD, a middleware framework for mitigation and possible avoidance of real-time failures in the face of denial of service attacks.