RESCUE: A Reconfigurable Scheduling Framework for Securing Multi-Core Real-Time Systems

Modern real-time systems face increasing vulnerabilities to cyber-attacks, particularly those that use multi-core chips, where safety-critical and non-safety-critical tasks execute concurrently. Existing solutions for multi-core systems often lack either determinism or cost-efficiency. This article introduces an offline analysis technique that computes all feasible schedules for real-time tasks running on multi-core platforms. Our proposed technique isolates compromised tasks while ensuring a fail-operational system and supports low-cost, reconfigurable scheduling. The analytical models presented in this article guarantee the hard real-time constraints of safety-critical tasks while allowing bounded deadline misses for some non-safety-critical tasks during an attack to enhance security. We name our scheme RESCUE. We conduct a comprehensive design-space exploration and evaluate its real-world efficacy using a UAV autopilot system case study deployed on a quad-core platform (Raspberry Pi). Results show that the proposed scheme introduces minimal recovery overhead, measured in microseconds on a Raspberry Pi, and achieves 100% coverage in reconfiguration responses to compromised tasks in synthetic test cases.