Isolating Real-Time Safety-Critical Embedded Systems via SGX-Based Lightweight Virtualization

Abstract

A promising approach for designing critical embedded systems is based on virtualization technologies and multicore platforms. These enable the deployment of both real-time and general-purpose systems with different criticalities in a single host. Integrating virtualization while also meeting the real-time and isolation requirements is non-trivial, and poses significant challenges especially in terms of certification. In recent years, researchers proposed hardware-assisted solutions to face issues coming from virtualization, and recently the use of Operating System (OS) virtualization as a more lightweight approach. Industries are hampered in leveraging this latter type of virtualization despite the clear benefits it introduces, such as reduced overhead, higher scalability, and effortless certification since there is still lack of approaches to address drawbacks. In this position paper, we propose the usage of Intel's CPU security extension, namely SGX, to enable the adoption of enclaves based on unikernel, a flavor of OS-level virtualization, in the context of real-time systems. We present the advantages of leveraging both the SGX isolation and the unikernel features in order to meet the requirements of safety-critical real-time systems and ease the certification process.

Enabling Kubernetes Orchestration of Mixed-Criticality Software for Autonomous Mobile Robots

“…To fulfill the need of safety-critical real-time systems and streamline the certification process, the authors in [40] examined the benefits of utilizing both SGX isolation and unikernel features. Another proposed framework for real-time orchestration introduces extensive modifications of the Kubernetes code-base and uses a unique patch for the Linux kernel to deploy best-effort and real-time tasks [41].…”

Outsmarting Agile Adversaries in the Electromagnetic Spectrum

“…236 This is enabled by the concept of hardware virtualization 237 supported by higher core processing power. 238 A partitioned OFP software design, as demonstrated by Lim et al, 2012, divided into core hardware interface and application modules with submodules for various avionics functions, provides a "separation of concerns," where a fault in one partition does not affect the other. Lim et al, 2012, concludes that "robust partitioning of software can easily and costeffectively obtain software safety assurance" (for the DO-178 B/C) " [and] each partition can be designed and developed by a specialized company reducing the cost."…”

Virtualizing Mixed-Criticality Systems: A Survey on Industrial Trends and Issues

“…In literature, there were very few studies that leverage Intel SGX extensions to design real-time mixed-criticality systems. One study that is worth mentioning is provided with a positioning paper by De Simone et al [104], which explored the possibility of using the SGX to enforce the isolation among critical tasks running on top of unikernel-based hypervisor [105,106]. The most explored approach has been to use the security features of ARM TrustZone.…”