Real-Time Scheduling for Preventing Information Leakage with Preemption Overheads

Abstract

Real-time systems (RTS) are characterized by tasks executing in a timely manner to meet its deadlines as a real-time constraint. Most studies of RTS have focused on these criteria as primary design points. However, recent increases in security threats to various real-time systems have shown that enhanced security support must be included as an important design point, retro-fitting such support to existing systems as necessary. In this paper, we propose a new pre-flush technique referred to as flush task reservation for FP scheduling (FTR-FP) to conditionally sanitize the state of resources shared by real-time tasks by invoking a flush task (FT) in order to mitigate information leakage/corruption of real-time systems. FTR-FP extends existing works exploiting FTs to be applicable more general scheduling algorithms and security model. We also propose modifications to existing real-time scheduling algorithms to implement a pre-flush technique as a security constraint, and analysis technique to verify schedulability of the real-time scheduling. For better analytic capability, our analysis technique provides a count of the precise number of preemptions that a task experiences offline. Our evaluation results demonstrate that our proposed schedulability analysis improves the performance of existing scheduling algorithms in terms of schedulability and preemption cost.

Keywords

• embedded software
• real-time systems
• scheduling algorithms
• security
• system analysis and design