A Tiny Scale VLIW Processor for Real-Time Constrained Embedded Control Tasks

Stecklina, Oliver; Methfessel, Michael

doi:10.1109/dsd.2014.31

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…The soft-core processor was also developed within the project and evaluated on the FPGA module on the configurable sensor node. The work was presented on the Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design (DSD) in 2014 [SM14]. I used the soft-core processor to illustrate the assembling of our MPU.…”

Section: Publications Related To This Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A secure isolation of software activities in tiny scale systems

Stecklina

2015

2015 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communication Workshops (PerCom Workshops)

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With the introduction of the Internet at the end of the last century the modern society was fundamentally changed. Computer systems became an element of nearly all parts of our daily live. Due to the interconnection of these systems local borders are mostly vanished, so that information is accessible and exchangeable anywhere and at anytime. But this increased connectivity causes that physical fences are not longer an adequate protection for computer systems. Whereas the security of commodity computer systems was improved continuously and similarly with their increased connectivity, deeply embedded systems were then and now mostly protected by physical fences. But the ubiquitous availability of embedded systems in personal and commercial environments makes these systems likewise accessible and moves them strongly into the focus of security investigations. Deeply embedded systems are usually equipped with tiny scale micro controllers, which are limited in their available resources and do not feature secure mechanisms to isolate system resources. Hence, a single error in a local software component is not limited to the component itself, instead the complete system may be influenced. The lack of resource isolation makes tiny scale systems prone for accidental errors but in particular vulnerable for a broad variety of malicious software. For a safe and secure operation of computer systems it is strongly recommended that software components are isolated in such a manner that they have access only to those resources, which are assigned to them. Even though a substantial number of approaches in the context of embedded system's safety were investigated during the last fifteen years, security was mostly neglected. This thesis is focused on security aspects where malicious software wittingly tries to bypass available protection mechanisms. The thesis introduces a security platform for tiny scale systems that enforces an isolation of software components considering security aspects. Due to the limited resources of tiny scale systems the proposed solution is based on a co-design process that takes the static and predefined nature of deeply embedded systems into account and includes hardware, compile-time, and run-time partitions to reduce the number of additional run-time components, to avoid performance drawbacks, and to minimize the memory as well as the components footprint overhead. To prove the applicability of the presented platform it was applied and evaluated with two real applications.In addition, an investigation of technologies of commodity computer systems that are suitable to build secure systems is presented. The thesis analyzes their enforcement based on the features provided by the introduced security platform. The contributions of this thesis include an enforcement of a security isolation of system resources on tiny scale systems and enable the development of a broad variety of secure tiny scale system applications.

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Section: Publications Related To This Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Due to the load/store architecture, each instruction can be coded in a single 16-bit word and is always executed within two clock cycles. Hence, the tinyVLIW8 has a very small design footprint and a predictable behavior, which predestines it for embedded control tasks in TSSs [SM14].…”

Section: Harvard Architecture -Tinyvliw8mentioning

confidence: 99%