SoK: Security in Real-Time Systems

Abstract

Security is an increasing concern for real-time systems (RTS). Over the last decade or so, researchers have demonstrated attacks and defenses aimed at such systems. In this article, we identify , classify and measure the effectiveness of the security research in this domain. We provide a high-level summary [ identification ] and a taxonomy [ classification ] of this existing body of work. Furthermore, we carry out an in-depth analysis [ measurement ] of scheduler-based security techniques — the most common class of real-time security mechanisms. For this purpose, we developed a common metric, “ attacker’s burden ” , used to measure the effectiveness of (existing as well as future) scheduler-based real-time security measures. This metric, built on the concept of “work factor” [ 1 ], is adapted for, and normalized across, various scheduler-based real-time security techniques.