Alejandro Mera (Northeastern University), Yi Hui Chen (Northeastern University), Ruimin Sun (Northeastern University), Engin Kirda (Northeastern University), Long Lu (Northeastern University)

Embedded and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices have seen an increase in adoption in many domains. The security of these devices is of great importance as they are often used to control critical infrastructure, medical devices, and vehicles. Existing solutions to isolate microcontroller (MCU) resources in order to increase their security face significant challenges such as specific hardware unavailability, Memory Protection Unit (MPU) limitations and a significant lack of Direct Memory Access (DMA) support. Nevertheless, DMA is fundamental for the power and performance requirements of embedded applications.

In this paper, we present D-Box, a systematic approach to enable secure DMA operations for compartmentalization solutions of embedded applications using real-time operating systems (RTOS). D Box defines a reference architecture and a workflow to protect DMA operations holistically. It provides practical methods to harden the kernel and define capability-based security policies for easy definition of DMA operations with strong security properties. We implemented a D-Box prototype for the Cortex M3/M4 on top of the popular FreeRTOS-MPU (F-MPU). The D-Box procedures and a stricter security model enabled DMA operations, yet it exposed 41 times less ROP (return-orienting-programming) gadgets when compared with the standard F-MPU. D-Box adds only a 2% processor overhead while reducing the power consumption of peripheral operation benchmarks by 18.2%. The security properties and performance of D Box were tested and confirmed on a real-world case study of a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) application.

View More Papers

Demo #12: Too Afraid to Drive: Systematic Discovery of...

Ziwen Wan (UC Irvine), Junjie Shen (UC Irvine), Jalen Chuang (UC Irvine), Xin Xia (UCLA), Joshua Garcia (UC Irvine), Jiaqi Ma (UCLA) and Qi Alfred Chen (UC Irvine)

Read More

Building Embedded Systems Like It’s 1996

Ruotong Yu (Stevens Institute of Technology, University of Utah), Francesca Del Nin (University of Padua), Yuchen Zhang (Stevens Institute of Technology), Shan Huang (Stevens Institute of Technology), Pallavi Kaliyar (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), Sarah Zakto (Cyber Independent Testing Lab), Mauro Conti (University of Padua, Delft University of Technology), Georgios Portokalidis (Stevens Institute of…

Read More

Evaluating Susceptibility of VPN Implementations to DoS Attacks Using...

Fabio Streun (ETH Zurich), Joel Wanner (ETH Zurich), Adrian Perrig (ETH Zurich)

Read More

Demo #8: Identifying Drones Based on Visual Tokens

Ben Nassi (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), Elad Feldman (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), Aviel Levy (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), Yaron Pirutin (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), Asaf Shabtai (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), Ryusuke Masuoka (Fujitsu System Integration Laboratories) and Yuval Elovici (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)

Read More