A software infrastructure for dependable embedded systems

摘要

Recent embedded systems like mobile phones and digital TV appliances have been increasing their functionalities. These systems become very complex, but new products should be developed with short time-to-market. Therefore, future embedded systems that will be more complex require a new software infrastructure that industries can develop new products faster by reusing existing software as much as possible. In our project, we are developing SPUMONE which is able to compose multiple functionalities with a minimum cost. SPUMONE enables multiple OSes to coexist on a single system. Therefore, most of existing application programs require no modification. For satisfying the requirements of embedded systems, one of the most important goal of SPUMONE is to satisfy real-time constraints of real-time OSes. When real-time OS and general purpose OS like Linux run at the same time, the real-time OS can ensure the real-time responsiveness. It is also important to ensure security in future embedded systems that is always connected to the Internet. Increasing the complexity and functionality in embedded systems makes the OS kernel more vulnerable from malicious programs. This raises the need of the integrity management system for the general purpose OS kernel. The integrity management system that observes the behavior of kernel activities from the outside of the OS kernel is promising approach to increase the security of the general purpose OS kernel. However, traditional integrity management systems require extra resources and do not take into account the monitoring on a multi-core processor. The monitoring service which is an integrity management system running on SPUMONE as a new OS personality checks the integrity of data structures in the general purpose OS kernel. It also takes into account running on a multi-core processor. Therefore, the monitoring service and the general purpose OS can run on different cores to reduce the overhead of the integrity management.