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Control-Flow Integrity for Real-Time Embedded Systems

Authors Robert J. Walls, Nicholas F. Brown, Thomas Le Baron, Craig A. Shue, Hamed Okhravi, Bryan C. Ward

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Robert J. Walls
  • Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA
Nicholas F. Brown
  • Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA
Thomas Le Baron
  • Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA
Craig A. Shue
  • Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA
Hamed Okhravi
  • MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, Massachusetts, USA
Bryan C. Ward
  • MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, Massachusetts, USA

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Robert J. Walls, Nicholas F. Brown, Thomas Le Baron, Craig A. Shue, Hamed Okhravi, and Bryan C. Ward. Control-Flow Integrity for Real-Time Embedded Systems. In 31st Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2019). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 133, pp. 2:1-2:24, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2019) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECRTS.2019.2

Abstract

Attacks on real-time embedded systems can endanger lives and critical infrastructure. Despite this, techniques for securing embedded systems software have not been widely studied. Many existing security techniques for general-purpose computers rely on assumptions that do not hold in the embedded case. This paper focuses on one such technique, control-flow integrity (CFI), that has been vetted as an effective countermeasure against control-flow hijacking attacks on general-purpose computing systems. Without the process isolation and fine-grained memory protections provided by a general-purpose computer with a rich operating system, CFI cannot provide any security guarantees. This work proposes RECFISH, a system for providing CFI guarantees on ARM Cortex-R devices running minimal real-time operating systems. We provide techniques for protecting runtime structures, isolating processes, and instrumenting compiled ARM binaries with CFI protection. We empirically evaluate RECFISH and its performance implications for real-time systems. Our results suggest RECFISH can be directly applied to binaries without compromising real-time performance; in a test of over six million realistic task systems running FreeRTOS, 85% were still schedulable after adding RECFISH.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Security and privacy → Embedded systems security
Keywords
  • Control-flow integrity

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