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Documents authored by Okhravi, Hamed


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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, and Bryan C. Ward

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 133, 31st Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2019)


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.

Cite as

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)


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@InProceedings{walls_et_al:LIPIcs.ECRTS.2019.2,
  author =	{Walls, Robert J. and Brown, Nicholas F. and Le Baron, Thomas and Shue, Craig A. and Okhravi, Hamed and Ward, Bryan C.},
  title =	{{Control-Flow Integrity for Real-Time Embedded Systems}},
  booktitle =	{31st Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2019)},
  pages =	{2:1--2:24},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-110-8},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2019},
  volume =	{133},
  editor =	{Quinton, Sophie},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECRTS.2019.2},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-107397},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ECRTS.2019.2},
  annote =	{Keywords: Control-flow integrity}
}
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