Resolving Availability and Run-time Integrity Conflicts in Real-Time Embedded Systems

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 18 Nov 2025 (v1), last revised 15 Apr 2026 (this version, v2)] Resolving Availability and Run-time Integrity Conflicts in Real-Time Embedded Systems Adam Caulfield, Muhammad Wasif Kamran, N. Asokan 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. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2511.14088 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2511.14088v2 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2511.14088 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Adam Caulfield [view email] [v1] Tue, 18 Nov 2025 03:16:50 UTC (175 KB) [v2] Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:53:26 UTC (193 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2025-11 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)