Biblio

The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) enabled a new class of smart and interactive devices. With their continuous connectivity and their access to valuable information in both the digital and physical world, they are attractive targets for security attackers. Hence, with their integration into both the industry and consumer devices, they added a new surface for cybersecurity attacks. These potential threats call for special care of security vulnerabilities during the design of IoT devices and CPS. The design of secure systems is a complex task, especially if they must adhere to other constraints, such as performance, power consumption, and others. A range of design space exploration tools have been proposed in academics, which aim to support system designers in their task of finding the optimal selection of hardware components and task mappings. Said tools offer a limited way of modeling attack scenarios as constraints for a system under design. The framework proposed in this paper aims at closing this gap, offering system designers a way to consider security attacks and security risks during the early design phase. It offers designers to model security constraints from the view of potential attackers, assessing the probability of successful security attacks and security risk. The framework's feasibility and performance is demonstrated by revisiting a potential system design of an industry partner.

Designing secure systems is a complex task, particularly for designers who are no security experts. Cyber security plays a key role in embedded systems, especially for the domain of the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT systems of this kind are becoming increasingly important in daily life as they simplify various tasks. They are usually small, either embedded into bigger systems or battery driven, and perform monitoring or one shot tasks. Thus, they are subject to manifold constraints in terms of performance, power consumption, chip area, etc. As they are continuously connected to the internet and utilize our private data to perform their tasks, they are interesting for potential attackers. Cyber security thus plays an important role for the design of an IoT system. As the usage of security measures usually increases both computation time, as well as power consumption, a conflict between these constraints must be solved. For the designers of such systems, balancing these constraints constitutes a highly complex task. In this paper we propose a novel approach for considering possible security attacks on embedded systems, simplifying the consideration of security requirements immediately at the start of the design process. We introduce a security aware design space exploration framework which based on an architectural, behavioral and security attack description, finds the optimal design for IoT systems. We also demonstrate the feasibility and the benefits of our framework based on a door access system use case.