SAFCM: A Security-Aware Feedback Control Mechanism for Distributed Real-Time Embedded Systems

Distributed Real-time Embedded (DRE) systems are facing great challenges in networked, unpredictable and especially unsecured environments. In such systems, there is a strong need to enforce security on distributed computing nodes in order to guard against potential threats, while satisfying the real-time requirements.

This paper proposes a Security-Aware Feedback Control Mechanism (SAFCM) which has the ability to dynamically change the security level to guarantee soft real-time requirements and make the security protection as strong as possible. In order to widely support distributed real-time systems, a multi-input multi-output feedback loop is designed and a model predictive controller is deployed based on an equation model that describes the dynamic behavior of the DRE systems.

This control loop uses security level scaling to globally control the CPU utilization and security performance for the whole system. We propose a "security level" metric based on an evolution of cryptography algorithms used in embedded systems. Experimental results demonstrate that SAFCM not only has the excellent adaptivity compared to open-loop mechanism, but also has a better overall performance than PID control mechanism.