Partitioned Real-Time Scheduling for Preventing Information Leakage

Abstract

Recent real-time systems have been gradually connected externally through the Internet. As each subsystem constituting a system has been developed from different vendors, the number of cases of security vulnerabilities in communication between subsystems has increased. In particular, real-time systems are vulnerable to timing inference attacks, such as cache-based side-channel attacks. Among the various methods for handling security problems of these systems, the flush task (FT) method is a simple and effective method to reduce the probability of information leakage by conditionally initializing the state of resources shared by tasks before a given scheduling. However, existing FT methods are for global scheduling only, and techniques for partitioned scheduling have not yet been studied. In this paper, we propose an FT-aware bin-packing (FT-bin-packing) algorithm that effectively allocates real-time tasks to identical multiprocessors to reduce the number of FTs invoked during the schedule of tasks in each processor. Based on the experimental results, we analyze the properties and performance of the FT-bin-packing algorithm. These results indicate that it can improve the performance of existing heuristic algorithms by up to 96.8% depending on the experimental setting.

Keywords

• Real-time system
• flush task method
• partitioned scheduling