TrackOS: a Security-Aware Real-Time Operating System

• ABSTRACT:
  
  We describe an approach to control-flow integrity protection for real-time systems. We present TrackOS, a security-aware real-time operating system. TrackOS checks a task's control stack against a statically-generated call graph, generated by an abstract interpretationbased tool that requires no source code. The monitoring is done from a dedicated task, the schedule of which is controlled by the real-time operating system scheduler. Finally, we implement a version of software-based attestation (SWATT) to ensure program-data integrity to strengthen our control-flow integrity checks. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by monitoring an open source autopilot in flight.

• BIBTEX:
  

  @InProceedings{pike-rv-16,
    author =    {Lee Pike and Pat Hickey and Trevor Elliott and Eric Mertens and Aaron Tomb},
    title =     {{TrackOS}: a Security-Aware Real-Time Operating System},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 16th Intl. Conference on Runtime Verification},
    publisher = {Springer},
    series  =   {LNCS},
    year =      {2016},
    month =     {September},
    note =      {Preprint available at \url{https://leepike.github.io/pub_pages/rv2016.html}},
  }
  

• PAPER DOWNLOAD: trackos-rv16.pdf

• ERRATA: In the paper published in the conference proceedings, the quotation on page 1 is incorrectly cited. The citation is corrected in the version of the paper here.