Toward the hardening of real-time operating systems

Safety and Mission-critical systems are evolving daily, requiring increasing levels of complexity in their design. While bare-metal single CPU systems were dedicated to such systems in the past, nowadays, multicore CPUs, GPUs, and other accelerators require more complex software management, with the need for an operating system controlling everything. The presence of the operating system opens more challenges to securing the final system’s full dependability. This paper analyses the hardening scenarios based on the evidence gathered by selective fault injection analysis of Real-Time Operating systems. While solutions might be delivered in different fashions, the emphasis on the paper is on the right approach to spot the sensitive part of the Operating system, saving the design from massive overheads.