Control-flow Integrity for Real-time Embedded Systems

As embedded systems become more connected and more ubiquitous in mission- and safety-critical systems, embedded devices have become a high- value target for hackers and security researchers. Attacks on real-time embedded systems software can put lives in danger and put our critical infrastructure at risk. Despite this, security techniques for embedded systems have not been widely studied. Many existing software security techniques for general purpose computers rely on assumptions that do not hold in the embedded case. This thesis 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 thesis explores a way to use CFI 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

Runtime Analysis with R2U2: A Tool Exhibition Report

We present R2U2 (Realizable, Responsive, Unobtrusive Unit), a hardware-supported tool and framework for the continuous monitoring of safety-critical and embedded cyber-physical systems. With the widespread advent of autonomous systems such as Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), satellites, rovers, and cars, real-time, on-board decision making requires unobtrusive monitoring of properties for safety, performance, security, and system health. R2U2 models combine past-time and future-time Metric Temporal Logic, “mission time” Linear Temporal Logic, probabilistic reasoning with Bayesian Networks, and model-based prognostics. The R2U2 monitoring engine can be instantiated as a hardware solution, running on an FPGA, or as a software component. The FPGA realization enables R2U2 to monitor complex cyber-physical systems without any overhead or instrumentation of the flight software. In this tool exhibition report, we present R2U2 and demonstrate applications on system runtime monitoring, diagnostics, software health management, and security monitoring for a UAS. Our tool demonstration uses a hardware-based processor-in-the-loop “iron-bird” configuration

Continuation of research in software for space operations support

Software technologies relevant to workstation executives are discussed. Evaluations of problems, potential or otherwise, seen with IBM's Workstation Executive (WEX) 2.5 preliminary design and applicable portions of the 2.5 critical design are presented. Diverse graphics requirements of the Johnson Space Center's Mission Control Center Upgrade (MCCU) are also discussed. The key is to use tools that are portable, compatible with the X window system, and best suited to the requirements of the associated application. This will include a User Interface Language (UIL), an interactive display builder, and a graphic plotting/modeling system. Work sheets are provided for POSIX 1003.4 real-time extensions and the requirements for the Center's automated information systems security plan, referred to as POSIX 1003.6, are discussed

System Software Abstraction Layer - much more than Operating System Abstraction Layer

Current and future aircraft systems require real-time embedded software with greater flexibility compared to what was previously available due to the continuous advancements in the technology leading to large and complex systems. Portability of software as one of the aspects of this flexibility is a major concern in application development for avionics domain for fast development and integration of systems. Abstractions of the hardware platform which have been already introduced by the operating system community allow the software modules to be reused on different hardware and with different physical resources. Now operating system community has come up with an abstraction layer called operating system abstraction layer (OSAL) which along with the hardware abstraction unifies the OS architecture too. It provides a common set of primitives independent of the underlying operating system and its particular architecture. Factors such as reliability, scalability and determinism of any application largely depend on the design and architecture of the application. This is the most important and critical factor of real time systems such as mission computers of avionics systems, missile control system or control computers of space shuttle. It demands developer to perform feasibility of different software architecture to select the best alternative. Authors’ analysis shows that to make any real time application more secure, scalable, deterministic, and highly portable, OSAL has to be extended to more than just operating system abstraction. This new view of OSAL will be called as system software abstraction layer (SSAL). In this paper, authors attempt to highlight the efficiency of SSAL as well as detailed description of its main features and design considerations. Authors have implemented the SSAL on top of two well known OS (WinCE and Vxworks) and performed extensive evaluations, which shows that it effectively reduces portability efforts while achieving simplicity, predictability, security and determinism. This paper presents in brief, the API functionalities, its components, implementation, interfaces, advantages and overheads along with a case study.Defence Science Journal, 2013, 63(2), pp.214-222, DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/dsj.63.426

On the cyber security issues of the internet infrastructure

The Internet network has received huge attentions by the research community. At a first glance, the network optimization and scalability issues dominate the efforts of researchers and vendors. Many results have been obtained in the last decades: the Internet’s architecture is optimized to be cheap, robust and ubiquitous. In contrast, such a network has never been perfectly secure. During all its evolution, the security threats of the Internet persist as a transversal and endless topic. Nowadays, the Internet network hosts a multitude of mission critical activities. The electronic voting systems and financial services are carried out through it. Governmental institutions, financial and business organizations depend on the performance and the security of the Internet. This role confers to the Internet network a critical characterization. At the same time, the Internet network is a vector of malicious activities, like Denial of Service attacks; many reports of attacks can be found in both academic outcomes and daily news. In order to mitigate this wide range of issues, many research efforts have been carried out in the past decades; unfortunately, the complex architecture and the scale of the Internet make hard the evaluation and the adoption of such proposals. In order to improve the security of the Internet, the research community can benefit from sharing real network data. Unfortunately, privacy and security concerns inhibit the release of these data: its suffices to imagine the big amount of private information (e.g., political preferences or religious belief) it is possible to get while reading the Internet packets exchanged between users and web services. This scenario motivates my research, and represents the context of this dissertation which contributes to the analysis of the security issues of the Internet infrastructures and describes relevant security proposals. In particular, the main outcomes described in this dissertation are: • the definition of a secure routing protocol for the Internet network able to provide cryptographic guarantees against false route announcement and invalid path attack; • the definition of a new obfuscation technique that allow the research community to publicly release their real network flows with formal guarantees of security and privacy; • the evidence of a new kind of leakage of sensitive informations obtained hacking the models used by sundry Machine Learning Algorithms