Visible to the public Work-in-Progress: Measuring Security Protection in Real-time Embedded Firmware

TitleWork-in-Progress: Measuring Security Protection in Real-time Embedded Firmware
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2022
AuthorsWu, Yuhao, Wang, Yujie, Zhai, Shixuan, Li, Zihan, Li, Ao, Wang, Jinwen, Zhang, Ning
Conference Name2022 IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS)
Date Publisheddec
KeywordsBridges, composability, Cyber-physical systems, Ecosystems, Embedded systems, Metrics, pubcrawl, Real-time Systems, resilience, Resiliency, Scheduling algorithms, security
AbstractThe proliferation of real-time cyber-physical systems (CPS) is making profound changes to our daily life. Many real-time CPSs are security and safety-critical because of their continuous interactions with the physical world. While the general perception is that the security protection mechanism deployment is often absent in real-time embedded systems, there is no existing empirical study that measures the adoption of these mechanisms in the ecosystem. To bridge this gap, we conduct a measurement study for real-time embedded firmware from both a security perspective and a real-time perspective. To begin with, we collected more than 16 terabytes of embedded firmware and sampled 1,000 of them for the study. Then, we analyzed the adoption of security protection mechanisms and their potential impacts on the timeliness of real-time embedded systems. Besides, we measured the scheduling algorithms supported by real-time embedded systems since they are also security-critical.
NotesISSN: 2576-3172
DOI10.1109/RTSS55097.2022.00050
Citation Keywu_work–progress_2022