{"ID":2839814,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14088","arxiv_id":"2511.14088","title":"Resolving Availability and Run-time Integrity Conflicts in Real-Time Embedded Systems","abstract":"Run-time integrity enforcement in real-time systems presents a fundamental conflict with availability. Existing approaches in real-time systems primarily focus on minimizing the execution-time overhead of monitoring. After a violation is detected, prior works face a trade-off: (1) prioritize availability and allow a compromised system to continue to ensure applications meet their deadlines, or (2) prioritize security by generating a fault to abort all execution. In this work, we propose PAIR, an approach that offers a middle ground between the stark extremes of this trade-off. PAIR monitors real-time tasks for run-time integrity violations and maintains an Availability Region (AR) of all tasks that are safe to continue. When a task causes a violation, PAIR triggers a non-maskable interrupt to kill the task and continue executing a non-violating task within AR. Thus, PAIR ensures only violating tasks are prevented from execution, while granting availability to remaining tasks. With its hardware approach, PAIR does not cause any run-time overhead to the executing tasks, integrates with real-time operating systems (RTOSs), and is affordable to low-end microcontroller units (MCUs) by incurring +2.3% overhead in memory and hardware usage.","short_abstract":"Run-time integrity enforcement in real-time systems presents a fundamental conflict with availability. Existing approaches in real-time systems primarily focus on minimizing the execution-time overhead of monitoring. After a violation is detected, prior works face a trade-off: (1) prioritize availability and allow a co...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14088","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14088v2","authors":"[\"Adam Caulfield\",\"Muhammad Wasif Kamran\",\"N. Asokan\"]","published":"2025-11-18T03:16:50Z","proceeding":"cs.CR","tasks":"[\"cs.CR\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}