Dependable Cyber-Physical Systems through Control Flow Monitoring
Van Der Woude, Joel
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/47623
Description
Title
Dependable Cyber-Physical Systems through Control Flow Monitoring
Author(s)
Van Der Woude, Joel
Contributor(s)
Sha, Lui
Issue Date
2013-05
Keyword(s)
security
cyber-physical systems
embedded systems
control flow
Abstract
Stuxnet, a computer virus found in Iranian nuclear facilities, proved the feasibility of an attack on
an industrial control system. Similar attacks on critical infrastructure such as the power grid or
clean water supply could have enormous economic and political consequences. In the interest
of preventing future attacks on cyber-physical systems, we investigate methods of prevention.
We explore the benefits of making architecture-level changes to the microprocessor as well as
leveraging the constraints of many embedded systems in order to prevent binary code injection.
Our approach utilizes control flow monitoring to ensure correct behavior of the system. By
monitoring the control flow, we are able to detect an attack on the cyber-physical system and
gracefully fail by switching to a trusted Simplex controller.
Our control flow checking mechanism is a stand-alone hardware module implemented with
hooks into the pipeline of a LEON3 processor. Our approach avoids incurring high overheads
present in software-based approaches, due to the parallel execution of our hardware module.
We show that it is possible to detect injected malicious code in such a way that allows us to
transition to a trusted Simplex controller in the event of an attack.
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