Enabling Trusted Scheduling in Embedded Systems

The growing complexity and increased networking of security-
and safety-critical systems expose them to the risk of adversarial compromise through remote attacks. These attacks
can result in full system compromise, but often the attacker
gains control only over some system components (e.g., a pe-
ripheral) and over some applications running on the system.
We consider the latter scenario and focus on enabling on-
schedule execution of critical applications that are running
on a partially compromised system — we call this trusted
scheduling. We identify the essential properties needed for
the realization of a trusted scheduling system and we design
an embedded system that achieves those properties. We
show that our system protects not only against misbehav-
ing applications but also against attacks by compromised
peripherals. We evaluate the feasibility and performance of
our system through a prototype implementation based on
the AVR ATmega103 microcontroller.

Author(s):

Ramya Jayaram Masti    
ETH Zurich
Switzerland

Claudio Marforio    
ETH Zurich
Switzerland

Aanjhan Ranganathan    
ETH Zurich
Switzerland

Aurélien Francillon    
Eurecom France
France

Srdjan Capkun    
ETH Zurich
Switzerland