Best Practices for Designing Safe & Secure Embedded Systems

SECTION I: Best Practices for Designing Secure Embedded Systems

Length: 2 Day
Format: Lecture

 

CEUs: 1.5

Vulnerabilities in products ranging from medical devices to industrial control systems and automobiles are being exploited by attackers. However, these systems can be hardened by following a variety of best practices. This two-day training gives you the skills to harden your embedded system to prevent vulnerabilities and defend against the most common attacks.

Topics covered in this section include:

Introduction

• Embedded Systems Attacks
• Uniquely Embedded Concerns
• Reliability and Security
• Obscurity and Security
• Entropy and Random Numbers

Threat Assessment

• Attackers and Assets
• Attack Surface
• Attack Trees
• Security Policy

Protecting Data at Rest

• Block Ciphers
• Cipher Modes
• Hashes
• Message Authentication Codes

Protecting Data in Motion

• Public-Key Cryptography
• Secure Protocols
• TLS/SSL

Defenses in Software

• Common Firmware Vulnerabilities
• Defensive Software Architectures
• Defensive Hardware Interfaces

Defenses in Hardware

• Securing External Memory
• JTAG/Debug Port Considerations
• Other Physical Attack Vectors
• Tamper Detection and Logging

Wrap-up and Discussion

SECTION 2: Best Practices for Designing Safe Embedded Systems

Length: 2 Days
Format: Lecture

 

CEUs: 1.5

Embedded systems are pervasive: from implantable medical devices to self-driving cars. The risks of human injury are also rising as more embedded systems connect to the internet and each other - becoming open to hacking as well as malfunction.

This course explains several key design techniques that you can employ to develop safer and more reliable embedded systems. Through our consulting with many companies in a range of industries, we are continually surprised that such techniques -- including the techniques you will learn in this course -- are not more widely known and practiced.

In this 2-day section, attendees will learn "what, why and how" of approximately a dozen practical, lightweight techniques for designing safer and more reliable embedded systems. We will focus on minimizing hazards and malfunctions though a combination of lightweight, demonstrably-effective design techniques. Architectural, process and cultural aspects will also be covered.

Topics covered in this section include:

System Partitioning for Designing Safe, Robust Systems

• Hardware / software partitioning
• Fault containment
• Real-time considerations

Run-Time Monitoring

• Power-on and run-time self-tests
• Hard and soft errors
• CPU load monitoring

Design for Test

• Benefits
• Adding controllability and observability into a system
• Using test results to identify root causes of defects

Managing Time for Safe Product Operation

• Defining real-time systems
• Scheduling strategies
• Rate monotonic algorithm
• Schedulable bound
• CPU utilization
• Task priority assignment

Run-time Logging

• Benefits
• Logging strategies
• Configurability
• Timestamping
• Data exfiltration
• Real-world case study

Safety Case Requirements

• Benefits
• Essential components
• Safety case example
• Fault tree analysis (FTA)
• Failure modes & effects analysis (FMEA)

Managing Software Complexity

• Benefits
• Measuring techniques
• Techniques for reducing complexity
• Metrics, including McCabe Cyclomatic complexity

Coding Standards

• Benefits
• Coding standard rules to minimize code defects
• Introducing and enforcing coding standard rules
• Examples of prescriptive coding rules that reduce defects

Static Analysis

• Benefits
• Examples of defects caught only through static analysis
• Tool configuration
• Reducing false positives

Code Inspections

• Benefits
• Approaches to code inspections
• Metrics
• Best practices

Issue Tracking

• Benefits
• Best practices
• Data-driven planning

Post Mortems

• Benefits
• Understanding root causes of problems
• Identifying areas for improvement