Related papers: Provable Execution in Real-Time Embedded Systems

Embedded devices are increasingly ubiquitous and their importance is hard to overestimate. While they often support safety-critical functions (e.g., in medical devices and sensor-alarm combinations), they are usually implemented under…

Modern society is getting accustomed to the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) for a variety of applications that involves security-critical user data and information transfers. In the lower end of the spectrum, these…

Modern society is increasingly surrounded by, and accustomed to, a wide range of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Internet-of-Things (IoT), and smart devices. They often perform safety-critical functions, e.g., personal medical devices,…

Current blockchain consensus protocols -- notably, Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) -- deliver global agreement but exhibit structural constraints. PoW anchors security in heavy computation, inflating energy use and imposing…

Microcontroller-based IoT devices often use embedded real-time operating systems (RTOSs). Vulnerabilities in these embedded RTOSs can lead to compromises of those IoT devices. Despite the significance of security protections, the absence of…

Malware and cheat developers use fileless execution techniques to evade traditional, signature-based security products. These methods include various types of manual mapping, module stomping, and threadless injection which work entirely…

Due to physical isolation as well as use of proprietary hardware and protocols, traditional real-time systems (RTS) were considered to be invulnerable to security breaches and external attacks. However, this assumption is being challenged…

Developing real-time automated test systems for embedded control systems has been a real problem. Some engineers and scientists have used customized software and hardware as a solution, which can be very expensive and time consuming to…

We propose ProSpeCT, a generic formal processor model providing provably secure speculation for the constant-time policy. For constant-time programs under a non-speculative semantics, ProSpeCT guarantees that speculative and out-of-order…

The design of tiny trust anchors has received significant attention over the past decade, to secure low-end MCU-s that cannot afford expensive security mechanisms. In particular, hardware/software (hybrid) co-designs offer low hardware…

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) integrate sensing, computing, communication and actuation capabilities to monitor and control operations in the physical environment. A key requirement of such systems is the need to provide predictable…

Recent proliferation of embedded systems has generated a bold new paradigm, known as open embedded systems. While traditional embedded systems provide only closed base applications (natively-installed software) to users, open embedded…

Process attestation systems verify that a continuous physical process, such as human authorship, actually occurred, rather than merely checking system state. These systems face a fundamental dependability challenge: the evidence collection…

Security analysis of blockchain technology is an active domain of research. There has been both cryptographic and game-theoretic security analysis of Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains. Prominent work includes the cryptographic security…

Embedded devices face an ever-expanding threat landscape: vulnerabilities in application software, operating system kernels, and peripherals threaten the embedded device integrity. Existing computer-architectural defenses fully consider at…

Attestation is a fundamental building block to establish trust over software systems. When used in conjunction with trusted execution environments, it guarantees that genuine code is executed even when facing strong attackers, paving the…

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…

Trust is the core building block of secure systems, and it is enforced through methods to ensure that a specific system is properly configured and works as expected. In this context, a Root of Trust (RoT) establishes a trusted environment,…

Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are used to protect sensitive data and run secure execution for security-critical applications, by providing an environment isolated from the rest of the system. However, over the last few years, TEEs…

Multi-party data management and blockchain systems require data sharing among participants. To provide resilient and consistent data sharing, transactions engines rely on Byzantine FaultTolerant consensus (BFT), which enables operations…