Robustness Analysis of Real-Time Scheduling Against Differential Power Analysis Attacks

Embedded systems (ESs) have been a prominent solution for enhancing system performance and reliability in recent years. ESs that are required to ensure functional correctness under timing constraints are referred to as real-time embedded systems (RTESs). With the emerging trend of utilizing RTESs in safety and reliability critical areas, security of RTESs, especially confidentiality of the communication, becomes of great importance. More recently, side-channel attacks (SCAs) posed serious threats to confidentiality protection mechanisms, namely, cryptographic algorithms. In this work, we present the first analytical framework for quantifying the influence of real-time scheduling policies on the robustness of secret keys against differential power analysis (DPA) attacks, one of the most popular type of SCAs. We validated the proposed concept on two representative scheduling algorithms, earliest deadline first scheduling (EDF) and rate-monotonic scheduling (RMS), via extensive experiments.