Impact Evaluation of Embedded Security Mechanisms on System Performance

Abstract

Experience in designing general-purpose systems that enforce security goals shows that achieving universality, security, and performance remains a very difficult challenge. As a result, two directions emerged in designing, one of which focused on universality and performance with limited security mechanisms, and another – on robust security with reasonable performance for limited sets of applications. In the first case, popular but unsecure systems were created, and various efforts were subsequently made to upgrade the protected infrastructure for such systems. In the work, the latter approach is considered. It is obvious that the inclusion of built-in security mechanisms leads to a decrease in system performance. The paper considers a reference monitor and the assessment of its impact on system performance. For this purpose, the functional structure of reference monitor is built and the analytical model of impact evaluation on system performance is proposed.