Securing Real-Time Systems using Schedule Reconfiguration

Abstract

Modern real-time systems are susceptible to cyber-attacks. The growing adoption of multi-core platforms, where safety and non-safety critical tasks coexist, further introduces new security challenges. Existing solutions suffer from either a lack of determinism or excessive cost. This paper addresses these shortcomings and proposes an offline analysis to compute all feasible schedules for real-time tasks running on a multi-core platform, isolating compromised tasks while guaranteeing a fail-operational system and low-cost reconfigurable scheduling. Our experimental results using a UAV autopilot system on a quad-core platform (Raspberry Pi) demonstrate that the proposed scheme incurs run-time recovery overhead at the level of microseconds. Also, the reconfiguration process covers up to 100% of all possible responses for compromised tasks in the synthetic test cases.