A Reconnaissance Attack Mechanism for Fixed-Priority Real-Time Systems

2017/05/07 by Chen, Chien-Ying, Ghassami, AmirEmad, Mohan, Sibin +4
#Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Operating Systems (cs.OS)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1705.02561

Abstract

In real-time embedded systems (RTS), failures due to security breaches can cause serious damage to the system, the environment and/or injury to humans. Therefore, it is very important to understand the potential threats and attacks against these systems. In this paper we present a novel reconnaissance attack that extracts the exact schedule of real-time systems designed using fixed priority scheduling algorithms. The attack is demonstrated on both a real hardware platform and a simulator, with a high success rate. Our evaluation results show that the algorithm is robust even in the presence of execution time variation.

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