Scheduling Randomization Protocol to Improve Schedule Entropy for Multiprocessor Real-Time Systems

Abstract

Because most tasks on real-time systems are conducted periodically, its execution pattern is highly predictable. While such a property of real-time systems allows developing the strong schedulability analysis tools providing high analytical capability, it also leads that security attackers could analyze the predictable execution patterns of real-time systems and use them as attack surfaces. Among the few approaches to foil such a timing-inference security attack, TaskShuffler as a schedule randomization protocol received considerable attention owing to its simplicity and applicability. However, the existing TaskShuffler is only applicable to uniprocessor platforms, where the task execution pattern is quite simple to analyze when compared to multiprocessor platforms. In this study, we propose a new schedule randomization protocol for real-time systems on symmetry multiprocessor platforms where all processors are composed of the same architecture, which extends the existing TaskShuffler initially designed for uniprocessor platforms.