Protecting Security-Critical Real-Time Systems against Fault Attacks in Many-Core Platforms

Abstract

Single-core platforms have been widely used for Many security-critical real-time systems. However, the ever-increasing high-performance requirements demanded by various industries and the advent of serious bottlenecks again increasing the performance of single-core platforms have necessitated the employment of many-core platforms in the design of such systems. This design shift from single to many-core platforms has been accompanied by security issues and has produced emerging security challenges. Fault injection attacks are one of the primary attacks that are used to infiltrate the tasks to reduce the system performance or cause system failures. In this paper, an online security-aware real-time hardware scheduler is proposed and used to avoid fault attacks using the task replication method. In the proposed real-time system, critical tasks and their replicas are scheduled with Least Slack Time first (LST) algorithm independently in the hardware under real-time constraints. Our synthesis and simulation results using Xilinx Vivado 2018.2 indicates that the proposed scheduler guarantees that all critical tasks and their replicas meet their deadlines. The results also show that our scheduler reduces the chance of a successful Fault attack and loss of the final result in critical tasks.