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RT-DFI: Optimizing Data-Flow Integrity for Real-Time Systems

Authors Nicolas Bellec , Guillaume Hiet , Simon Rokicki , Frederic Tronel , Isabelle Puaut

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Author Details

Nicolas Bellec
  • Univ Rennes, Inria, CNRS, IRISA, France
Guillaume Hiet
  • CentraleSupélec, Inria, Univ Rennes, CNRS, IRISA, France
Simon Rokicki
  • Univ Rennes, Inria, CNRS, IRISA, France
Frederic Tronel
  • CentraleSupélec, Inria, Univ Rennes, CNRS, IRISA, France
Isabelle Puaut
  • Univ Rennes, Inria, CNRS, IRISA, France

Acknowledgements

We want to warmly thank AbsInt for providing the aiT WCET estimator.

Cite AsGet BibTex

Nicolas Bellec, Guillaume Hiet, Simon Rokicki, Frederic Tronel, and Isabelle Puaut. RT-DFI: Optimizing Data-Flow Integrity for Real-Time Systems. In 34th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2022). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 231, pp. 18:1-18:24, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2022)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECRTS.2022.18

Abstract

The emergence of Real-Time Systems with increased connections to their environment has led to a greater demand in security for these systems. Memory corruption attacks, which modify the memory to trigger unexpected executions, are a significant threat against applications written in low-level languages. Data-Flow Integrity (DFI) is a protection that verifies that only a trusted source has written any loaded data. The overhead of such a security mechanism remains a major issue that limits its adoption. This article presents RT-DFI, a new approach that optimizes Data-Flow Integrity to reduce its overhead on the Worst-Case Execution Time. We model the number and order of the checks and use an Integer Linear Programming solver to optimize the protection on the Worst-Case Execution Path. Our approach protects the program against many memory-corruption attacks, including Return-Oriented Programming and Data-Only attacks. Moreover, our experimental results show that our optimization reduces the overhead by 7% on average compared to a state-of-the-art implementation.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Real-time systems software
  • Security and privacy → Software and application security
Keywords
  • Real-time system
  • Software security
  • Data-flow integrity
  • Worst-case execution time

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