Query: Security in embedded systems: design challenges

Candidate papers:

abstract: Many modern electronic systems including personal computers, PDAs, cell phones, network routers, smart cards, and networked sensors to name a few need to access, store, manipulate, or communicate sensitive information, making security a serious concern in their design. Embedded systems, which account for a wide range of products from the electronics, semiconductor, telecommunications, and networking industries, face some of the most demanding security concerns on the one hand, they are often highly resource constrained, while on the other hand, they frequently need to operate in physically insecure environments.Security has been the subject of intensive research in the context of general purpose computing and communications systems. However, security is often misconstrued by embedded system designers as the addition of features, such as specific cryptographic algorithms and security protocols, to the system. In reality, it is a new dimension that designers should consider throughout the design process, along with other metrics such as cost, performance, and power.The challenges unique to embedded systems require new approaches to security covering all aspects of embedded system design from architecture to implementation. Security processing, which refers to the computations that must be performed in a system for the purpose of security, can easily overwhelm the computational capabilities of processors in both low and high end embedded systems. This challenge, which we refer to as the "security processing gap," is compounded by increases in the amounts of data manipulated and the data rates that need to be achieved. Equally daunting is the "battery gap" in battery powered embedded systems, which is caused by the disparity between rapidly increasing energy requirements for secure operation and slow improvements in battery technology. The final challenge is the "assurance gap," which relates to the gap between functional security measures (e.g. security services, protocols, and their constituent cryptographic algorithms) and actual secure implementations. This paper provides an introduction to the challenges involved in secure embedded system design, discusses recent advances in addressing them, and identifies opportunities for future research.
author_names: Srivaths Ravi

Anand Raghunathan

Paul C Kocher

Sunil Hattangady
title: Security in embedded systems: Design challenges
venue: TECS
year: 2004

abstract: This paper describes the current state of the art of side channel attacks (side channel cryptanalysis) on embedded systems. Major countermeasures proposed in the literature are reviewed and the challenges faced by embedded system designers while considering the implementation of such countermeasures are highlighted. The large number of problems to be taken into account and the highly application dependent character of side channel attacks make it impossible to advise adequate countermeasure as general solutions. The designer must therefore start by defining the adversary the device must resist against and with the resources available for him choose appropriate countermeasures against this adversary. The paper gives an overview of an ongoing research work which aims at finding novel hardware based techniques to implement countermeasures for timing and power analysis attacks.
author_names: Peter D Dawoud

D S Dawoud

Adronis Niyonkuru
title: Security in Embedded Systems: Design Challenges
year: 2011

abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the fastest growing technologies in computing, revolutionizing several application domains such as wearable computing, home automation, industrial manufacturing, etc. This rapid proliferation, however, has given rise to a plethora of new security and privacy concerns. For example, IoT devices frequently access sensitive and confidential information (e.g. physiological signals) which has made them attractive targets for various security attacks. Moreover, with the hardware components in these systems sourced from manufacturers across the globe, instances of counterfeiting and piracy have increased steadily. Security mechanisms such as device authentication and key exchange are attractive options for alleviating these challenges.In this dissertation, we address the challenge of enabling low cost and low overhead device authentication and key exchange in off the shelf embedded systems. The first part of the dissertation focuses on a hardware intrinsic mechanism and proposes the design of two Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) which leverage the memory (DRAM, SRAM) in the system, thus, requiring minimal (or no) additional hardware for operation. Two lightweight authentication and error correction techniques, which ensure robust operation under wide environmental and temporal variations, are also presented. Experimental results obtained from prototype implementations demonstrate the effectiveness of the design. The second part of the dissertation focuses on the application of these techniques in real world systems through a new end to end authentication and key exchange protocol in the context of an Implantable Medical Device (IMD) ecosystem. Prototype implementations exhibit an energy efficient design that guards against security and privacy attacks, thereby making it suitable for resource constrained devices such as IMDs.
author_names: Soubhagya Sutar
title: Memory based Hardware intrinsic Security Mechanisms for Device Authentication in Embedded Systems
year: 2020

abstract: Memory corruption vulnerabilities have been around for decades and rank among the most prevalent vulnerabilities in embedded systems. Yet this constrained environment poses unique design and implementation challenges that significantly complicate the adoption of common hardening techniques. Combined with the irregular and involved nature of embedded patch management, this results in prolonged vulnerability exposure windows and vulnerabilities that are relatively easy to exploit. Considering the sensitive and critical nature of many embedded systems, this situation merits significant improvement. In this work, we present the first quantitative study of exploit mitigation adoption in 42 embedded operating systems, showing the embedded world to significantly lag behind the general purpose world. To improve the security of deeply embedded systems, we subsequently present uArmor, an approach to address some of the key gaps identified in our quantitative analysis. uArmor raises the bar for exploitation of embedded memory corruption vulnerabilities, while being adoptable on the short term without incurring prohibitive extra performance or storage costs.
author_names: Ali Abbasi

Jos Wetzels

Thorsten Holz

Sandro Etalle
title: Challenges in Designing Exploit Mitigations for Deeply Embedded Systems
venue: 2019 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P)
year: 2019

abstract: Automotive systems are currently undergoing a radical shift in the way they are designed, implemented and deployed. Such changes impose an increased complexity and a high number of requirements in order to be more automated, connected, dependable and cost effective. This raises several challenges that the embedded systems community has to face, encountered at different stages of systems development from modeling and design to software/hardware deployment and validation. This paper discusses current industrial trends and open problems in the hardware and software design of automotive systems, dictating rigorous constraints in terms of safety, real time capabilities and security which have to be considered in future automotive systems design.
author_names: Selma Saidi

Sebastian Steinhorst

Arne Hamann

Dirk Ziegenbein

Marko Wolf
title: Future automotive systems design: research challenges and opportunities: special session
venue: CODES+ISSS
year: 2018

abstract: The edge computing paradigm has emerged to handle cloud computing issues such as scalability, security and low response time among others. This new computing trend heavily relies on ubiquitous embedded systems on the edge. Performance and energy consumption are two main factors that should be considered during the design of such systems. Focusing on performance and energy consumption, this paper studies the opportunities and challenges that a heterogeneous embedded system consisting of embedded FPGAs and GPUs (as accelerators) can provide for applications. We study three design, modeling and scheduling challenges throughout the paper. We also propose three techniques to cope with these three challenges. Applying the proposed techniques to three applications including image histogram, dense matrix vector multiplication and sparse matrix vector multiplications show 1.79x and 2.29x improvements in performance and energy consumption, respectively, when both FPGA and GPU execute the corresponding application in parallel.
author_names: Mohammad Hosseinabady

Mohd Amiruddin Bin Zainol

Jose Luis Nunez-Yanez
title: Heterogeneous FPGA+GPU Embedded Systems: Challenges and Opportunities
venue: ArXiv
year: 2019

abstract: Automotive systems are currently undergoing a radical shift in the way they are designed, implemented and deployed. Such changes impose an increased complexity and a high number of requirements in order to be more automated, connected, dependable and cost effective. This raises several challenges that the embedded systems community has to face, encountered at different stages of systems development from modeling and design to software/hardware deployment and validation. This paper discusses current industrial trends and open problems in the hardware and software design of automotive systems, dictating rigorous constraints in terms of safety, real time capabilities and security which have to be considered in future automotive systems design.
author_names: Selma Saidi

Sebastian Steinhorst

Arne Hamann

Dirk Ziegenbein

Marko Wolf
title: Special Session: Future Automotive Systems Design: Research Challenges and Opportunities
venue: 2018 International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis (CODES+ISSS)
year: 2018

abstract: Embedded Systems account for a wide range of products and are employed in various heterogeneous domains, including but not limited to: industrial systems (e.g. manufacturing plants) critical environments (e.g. military and avionics) nomadic environments (e.g. personal wearable nodes) private spaces (e.g. residences) and public infrastructures (e.g. airports) These devices often need to access, store, manipulate and/or communicate sensitive or even critical information, making the security of their resources and services an imperative concern in their design. The problem is exacerbated by their resource constraints, their diversified application settings, frequently requiring unattended operation in physically insecure environments and dynamic network formulation, in conjunction with the ever present need for smaller size and lower production costs. This paper provides an overview of the challenges in Embedded Systems security, pertaining to node hardware and software as well as relevant network protocols and cryptographic algorithms, presents recent advances in the field and identifies opportunities for future research. Keywords embedded devices; security; denial of service; lightweight cryptography; location privacy; secure routing;
author_names: Konstantinos Fysarakis

Charalampos Manifavas
title: Embedded Systems Security Aspects of secure embedded systems design and implementation
year: 2012

abstract: The mass integration and deployment of intelligent technologies within critical commercial, industrial and public environments have a significant impact on business operations and society as a whole. Though integration of these critical intelligent technologies pose serious embedded security challenges for technology manufacturers which are required to be systematically approached, in line with international security regulations.This paper establish security foundation for such intelligent technologies by deriving embedded security requirements to realise the core security functions laid out by international security authorities, and proposing microarchitectural characteristics to establish cyber resilience in embedded systems. To bridge the research gap between embedded and operational security domains, a detailed review of existing embedded security methods, microarchitectures and design practises is presented. The existing embedded security methods have been found ad hoc, passive and strongly rely on building and maintaining trust. To the best of our knowledge to date, no existing embedded security microarchitecture or defence mechanism provides continuity of data stream or security once trust has broken. This functionality is critical for embedded technologies deployed in critical infrastructure to enhance and maintain security, and to gain evidence of the security breach to effectively evaluate, improve and deploy active response and mitigation strategies. To this end, the paper proposes three microarchitectural characteristics that shall be designed and integrated into embedded architectures to establish, maintain and improve cyber resilience in embedded systems for next generation critical infrastructure.
author_names: Fahad Manzoor Siddiqui

Matthew Hagan

Sakir Sezer
title: Establishing Cyber Resilience in Embedded Systems for Securing Next Generation Critical Infrastructure
venue: 2019 32nd IEEE International System on Chip Conference (SOCC)
year: 2019

abstract: Abstract As a hotspot of machine learning research, deep learning is applied in many fields. Embedded systems are becoming more and more complex and networked, so the real time performance of embedded systems and the security of network embedded devices face severe challenges. Based on this, this paper studies the real time task scheduling problem for complex embedded systems and the security of embedded network devices. For real time, this paper proposes a comprehensive task scheduling algorithm. Based on the task classification in the embedded system, different scheduling methods are adopted for different tasks, and the scheduling mode is flexibly changed as the system load changes. A dynamic integrity measurement model is established based on the star trust chain structure, and the hardware implementation mechanism of constructing dynamic trust chain in embedded system is studied. The dynamic reconfigurable hardware design method based on FPGA is applied to the construction of dynamic trust chain, and a verification system is designed to verify the dynamic measurement mechanism. This can solve the security problem of deep network embedded devices to a certain extent.
author_names: Junyan Zhou
title: Real time task scheduling and network device security for complex embedded systems based on deep learning networks
venue: Microprocess. Microsystems
year: 2020