Patchlings: Safety-Preserving Flash-Based Hotpatching for Automotive Microcontrollers

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 27 May 2026] Patchlings: Safety-Preserving Flash-Based Hotpatching for Automotive Microcontrollers Yuxin "Myles" Liu, Sekar Kulandaivel, Ardalan Amiri Sani, Jorge Guajardo The increasing presence of software in modern automobiles has created a growing need to deliver software updates throughout a vehicle's entire lifespan. Traditional update methods are slow and require months of re-validation to comply with stringent safety standards like ISO 26262. Although hotpatching offers a path to faster updates, existing solutions for real-time embedded systems are unsuitable for the automotive domain: they overlook regulatory compliance, demand extensive safety validation, and lack support for the flash-based Execute-in-Place (XIP) architecture commonly used in automotive electronic control units (ECUs). We introduce Patchlings, the first hotpatching framework designed for compliance, safety, and persistence in automotive systems. It fills the gap in applying hotpatching to automotive systems and fundamentally reduces the mean-time-to-mitigate (MTTM) for vulnerabilities and bugs. We implement and evaluate a complete prototype of Patchlings on an automotive-grade hardware platform, NXP S32K148EVB, with both FreeRTOS and Zephyr. Our results demonstrate low and deterministic overhead (e.g., 3.3 \mus when a patch is applied), small firmware size increase (e.g., as low as 6.34%), and successful patching of different types of real CVEs, proving its real-world applicability and effectiveness. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Operating Systems (cs.OS) ACM classes: C.5.3; D.4 Cite as: arXiv:2605.27804 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2605.27804v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.27804 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Yuxin (Myles) Liu [view email] [v1] Wed, 27 May 2026 00:51:57 UTC (1,385 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.OS 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?)