Resolving Availability and Run-time Integrity Conflicts in Real-Time Embedded Systems
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866911594998398976 |
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| author | Caulfield, Adam Kamran, Muhammad Wasif Asokan, N. |
| author_facet | Caulfield, Adam Kamran, Muhammad Wasif Asokan, N. |
| contents | Run-time integrity enforcement in real-time systems presents a fundamental conflict with availability. Existing approaches in real-time systems primarily focus on minimizing the execution-time overhead of monitoring. After a violation is detected, prior works face a trade-off: (1) prioritize availability and allow a compromised system to continue to ensure applications meet their deadlines, or (2) prioritize security by generating a fault to abort all execution. In this work, we propose PAIR, an approach that offers a middle ground between the stark extremes of this trade-off. PAIR monitors real-time tasks for run-time integrity violations and maintains an Availability Region (AR) of all tasks that are safe to continue. When a task causes a violation, PAIR triggers a non-maskable interrupt to kill the task and continue executing a non-violating task within AR. Thus, PAIR ensures only violating tasks are prevented from execution, while granting availability to remaining tasks. With its hardware approach, PAIR does not cause any run-time overhead to the executing tasks, integrates with real-time operating systems (RTOSs), and is affordable to low-end microcontroller units (MCUs) by incurring +2.3% overhead in memory and hardware usage. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_14088 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Resolving Availability and Run-time Integrity Conflicts in Real-Time Embedded Systems Caulfield, Adam Kamran, Muhammad Wasif Asokan, N. Cryptography and Security Run-time integrity enforcement in real-time systems presents a fundamental conflict with availability. Existing approaches in real-time systems primarily focus on minimizing the execution-time overhead of monitoring. After a violation is detected, prior works face a trade-off: (1) prioritize availability and allow a compromised system to continue to ensure applications meet their deadlines, or (2) prioritize security by generating a fault to abort all execution. In this work, we propose PAIR, an approach that offers a middle ground between the stark extremes of this trade-off. PAIR monitors real-time tasks for run-time integrity violations and maintains an Availability Region (AR) of all tasks that are safe to continue. When a task causes a violation, PAIR triggers a non-maskable interrupt to kill the task and continue executing a non-violating task within AR. Thus, PAIR ensures only violating tasks are prevented from execution, while granting availability to remaining tasks. With its hardware approach, PAIR does not cause any run-time overhead to the executing tasks, integrates with real-time operating systems (RTOSs), and is affordable to low-end microcontroller units (MCUs) by incurring +2.3% overhead in memory and hardware usage. |
| title | Resolving Availability and Run-time Integrity Conflicts in Real-Time Embedded Systems |
| topic | Cryptography and Security |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14088 |