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Title: On the Pitfalls and Vulnerabilities of Schedule Randomization Against Schedule-Based Attacks
Schedule randomization is one of the recently introduced security defenses against schedule-based attacks, i.e., attacks whose success depends on a particular ordering between the execution window of an attacker and a victim task within the system. It falls into the category of information hiding (as opposed to deterministic isolation-based defenses) and is designed to reduce the attacker's ability to infer the future schedule. This paper aims to investigate the limitations and vulnerabilities of schedule randomization-based defenses in real-time systems. We first provide definitions, categorization, and examples of schedule-based attacks, and then discuss the challenges of employing schedule randomization in real-time systems. Further, we provide a preliminary security test to determine whether a certain timing relation between the attacker and victim tasks will never happen in systems scheduled by a fixed-priority scheduling algorithm. Finally, we compare fixed-priority scheduling against schedule-randomization techniques in terms of the success rate of various schedule-based attacks for both synthetic and real-world applications. Our results show that, in many cases, schedule randomization either has no security benefits or can even increase the success rate of the attacker depending on the priority relation between the attacker and victim tasks.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1646317 1839321
NSF-PAR ID:
10108594
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
2019 IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
103 to 116
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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