Exploring Opportunistic Execution for Integrating Security into Legacy Hard Real-Time Systems
This addresses security vulnerabilities in legacy real-time systems, which are critical for safety-critical applications, but the approach appears incremental as it builds on existing scheduling methods.
The paper tackles the problem of integrating security mechanisms into legacy hard real-time systems, which are increasingly vulnerable to attacks, by combining opportunistic execution with hierarchical scheduling to maintain compatibility and flexibility, resulting in improved security posture without affecting temporal constraints.
Due to physical isolation as well as use of proprietary hardware and protocols, traditional real-time systems (RTS) were considered to be invulnerable to security breaches and external attacks. However, this assumption is being challenged by recent attacks that highlight the vulnerabilities in such systems. In this paper, we focus on integrating security mechanisms into RTS (especially legacy RTS) and provide a metric to measure the effectiveness of such mechanisms. We combine opportunistic execution with hierarchical scheduling to maintain compatibility with legacy systems while still providing flexibility. The proposed approach is shown to increase the security posture of RTS systems without impacting their temporal constraints.