2026-07-23T22:21:26Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:10739 2024-03-06T10:46:35Z ddc:004 open_access

Control-Flow Integrity for Real-Time Embedded Systems Walls, Robert J. Brown, Nicholas F. Le Baron, Thomas Shue, Craig A. Okhravi, Hamed Ward, Bryan C. Control-flow integrity 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. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Robert J. Walls and Nicholas F. Brown and Thomas Le Baron and Craig A. Shue and Hamed Okhravi and Bryan C. Ward 2019 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 133, 31st Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2019) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.ECRTS.2019.2 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-107397 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECRTS.2019.2 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode