TyTAN: tiny trust anchor for tiny devices

ABSTRACT

Embedded systems are at the core of many security-sensitive and safety-critical applications, including automotive, industrial control systems, and critical infrastructures. Existing protection mechanisms against (software-based) malware are inflexible, too complex, expensive, or do not meet real-time requirements.

We present TyTAN, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first security architecture for embedded systems that provides (1) hardware-assisted strong isolation of dynamically configurable tasks and (2) real-time guarantees. We implemented TyTAN on the Intel® Siskiyou Peak embedded platform and demonstrate its efficiency and effectiveness through extensive evaluation.

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Index Terms

• Computer systems organization

  • Embedded and cyber-physical systems

    • Embedded systems

  • Real-time systems

• Security and privacy

• Social and professional topics

  • Computing / technology policy

    • Computer crime

• Software and its engineering

  • Software organization and properties

    • Software system structures

      • Embedded software

      • Real-time systems software