ISC-FLAT: On the Conflict Between Control Flow Attestation and Real-Time Operations

The wide adoption of IoT gadgets and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) makes embedded devices increasingly important. While some of these devices perform mission-critical tasks, they are usually implemented using Micro-Controller Units (MCUs) that lack security mechanisms on par with those available to general-purpose computers, making them more susceptible to remote exploits that could corrupt their software integrity. Motivated by this problem, prior work has proposed techniques to remotely assess the trustworthiness of embedded MCU software. Among them, Control Flow Attestation (CFA) enables remote detection of runtime abuses that illegally modify the program's control flow during execution. Despite these advances, current CFA methods share a fundamental limitation: they preclude interrupts during the execution of the software operation being attested. Simply put, existing CFA techniques are insecure unless interrupts are disabled on the MCU. On the other hand, we argue that the lack of interruptability can obscure CFA usefulness, as most embedded applications depend on interrupts to process asynchronous events in real-time. To address this limitation, we propose Interrupt-Safe Control Flow Attestation (ISC-FLAT): a CFA technique that is compatible with existing MCUs and enables interrupt handling without compromising the authenticity of CFA reports. Similar to other CFA techniques that do not require customized hardware modifications, ISC-FLAT leverages a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) (in particular, our prototype is built on ARM TrustZone-M) to securely generate unforgeable CFA reports without precluding applications from processing interrupts. We implement a fully functional ISC-FLAT prototype on the ARM Cortex-M33 MCU and demonstrate that it incurs minimal runtime overhead when compared to existing TEE-based CFA methods that do not support interrupts.
Comment: Article to appear in RTAS '23 Proceedings of the 29th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium