Consideration of Security Attacks in the Design Space Exploration of Embedded Systems

Abstract

Designing secure systems is a complex task, particularly for designers who are no security experts. Cyber security plays a key role in embedded systems, especially for the domain of the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT systems of this kind are becoming increasingly important in daily life as they simplify various tasks. They are usually small, either embedded into bigger systems or battery driven, and perform monitoring or one shot tasks. Thus, they are subject to manifold constraints in terms of performance, power consumption, chip area, etc. As they are continuously connected to the internet and utilize our private data to perform their tasks, they are interesting for potential attackers. Cyber security thus plays an important role for the design of an IoT system. As the usage of security measures usually increases both computation time, as well as power consumption, a conflict between these constraints must be solved. For the designers of such systems, balancing these constraints constitutes a highly complex task. In this paper we propose a novel approach for considering possible security attacks on embedded systems, simplifying the consideration of security requirements immediately at the start of the design process. We introduce a security aware design space exploration framework which based on an architectural, behavioral and security attack description, finds the optimal design for IoT systems. We also demonstrate the feasibility and the benefits of our framework based on a door access system use case.