Publications

Low-level embedded control systems are increasingly being targeted by adversaries, and there is a strong need for stronger software defenses for such systems. The cyber-physical nature of such systems impose real-time performance constraints not seen in enterprise computing systems, and such constraints fundamentally alter how software defenses should be designed and applied. MIT Lincoln Laboratory scientists demonstrated that current randomization-based defenses, which have low average-case overhead, can incur significant worst-case overhead that may be untenable in real-time applications, while some low-overhead enforcement-based defenses have low worst-case performance overheads making them more amenable to real-time applications. Such defenses should be incorporated into a comprehensive resilient architecture with a strategy for failover and timely recovery in the case of a cyber threat.