A Reconnaissance Attack Mechanism for Fixed-Priority Real-Time Systems
This addresses security vulnerabilities in real-time embedded systems, which can prevent failures causing damage or injury, though it is incremental as it focuses on a specific attack mechanism.
The paper tackles the problem of security in fixed-priority real-time systems by presenting a novel reconnaissance attack that extracts the exact schedule, achieving a high success rate on both hardware and simulator platforms and demonstrating robustness against execution time variation.
In real-time embedded systems (RTS), failures due to security breaches can cause serious damage to the system, the environment and/or injury to humans. Therefore, it is very important to understand the potential threats and attacks against these systems. In this paper we present a novel reconnaissance attack that extracts the exact schedule of real-time systems designed using fixed priority scheduling algorithms. The attack is demonstrated on both a real hardware platform and a simulator, with a high success rate. Our evaluation results show that the algorithm is robust even in the presence of execution time variation.