Title: Contego: An Adaptive Framework for Integrating Security Tasks in Real-Time Systems,
Abstract: Embedded real-time systems (RTS) are pervasive. Many modern RTS are exposed
to unknown security flaws, and threats to RTS are growing in both number and
sophistication. However, until recently, cyber-security considerations were an
afterthought in the design of such systems. Any security mechanisms integrated
into RTS must (a) co-exist with the real- time tasks in the system and (b)
operate without impacting the timing and safety constraints of the control
logic. We introduce Contego, an approach to integrating security tasks into RTS
without affecting temporal requirements. Contego is specifically designed for
legacy systems, viz., the real-time control systems in which major alterations
of the system parameters for constituent tasks is not always feasible. Contego
combines the concept of opportunistic execution with hierarchical scheduling to
maintain compatibility with legacy systems while still providing flexibility by
allowing security tasks to operate in different modes. We also define a metric
to measure the effectiveness of such integration. We evaluate Contego using
synthetic workloads as well as with an implementation on a realistic embedded
platform (an open- source ARM CPU running real-time Linux).