CyFence: Securing Cyber-Physical Controllers via Trusted Execution Environment

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Longari, Stefano, Pozone, Alessandro, Leoni, Jessica, Polino, Mario, Carminati, Michele, Tanelli, Mara, Zanero, Stefano
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Longari, Stefano
Pozone, Alessandro
Leoni, Jessica
Polino, Mario
Carminati, Michele
Tanelli, Mara
Zanero, Stefano
author_facet Longari, Stefano
Pozone, Alessandro
Leoni, Jessica
Polino, Mario
Carminati, Michele
Tanelli, Mara
Zanero, Stefano
contents In the last decades, Cyber-physical Systems (CPSs) have experienced a significant technological evolution and increased connectivity, at the cost of greater exposure to cyber-attacks. Since many CPS are used in safety-critical systems, such attacks entail high risks and potential safety harms. Although several defense strategies have been proposed, they rarely exploit the cyber-physical nature of the system. In this work, we exploit the nature of CPS by proposing CyFence, a novel architecture that improves the resilience of closed-loop control systems against cyber-attacks by adding a semantic check, used to confirm that the system is behaving as expected. To ensure the security of the semantic check code, we use the Trusted Execution Environment implemented by modern processors. We evaluate CyFence considering a real-world application, consisting of an active braking digital controller, demonstrating that it can mitigate different types of attacks with a negligible computation overhead.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_10638
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CyFence: Securing Cyber-Physical Controllers via Trusted Execution Environment
Longari, Stefano
Pozone, Alessandro
Leoni, Jessica
Polino, Mario
Carminati, Michele
Tanelli, Mara
Zanero, Stefano
Cryptography and Security
In the last decades, Cyber-physical Systems (CPSs) have experienced a significant technological evolution and increased connectivity, at the cost of greater exposure to cyber-attacks. Since many CPS are used in safety-critical systems, such attacks entail high risks and potential safety harms. Although several defense strategies have been proposed, they rarely exploit the cyber-physical nature of the system. In this work, we exploit the nature of CPS by proposing CyFence, a novel architecture that improves the resilience of closed-loop control systems against cyber-attacks by adding a semantic check, used to confirm that the system is behaving as expected. To ensure the security of the semantic check code, we use the Trusted Execution Environment implemented by modern processors. We evaluate CyFence considering a real-world application, consisting of an active braking digital controller, demonstrating that it can mitigate different types of attacks with a negligible computation overhead.
title CyFence: Securing Cyber-Physical Controllers via Trusted Execution Environment
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10638