Trusted Real Time Operating System: Identifying its characteristics

Real Time Operating System (RTOS) had emerged in the market for the past few decades to provide solutions over various platforms that range from embedded devices to more sophisticated electronic system such nuclear plant and spacecraft. The evolution of the design of operating systems continues to endure the need of diverse applications that run on various platforms. Recently, there was a new element introduced to provide trust enhancement on the platform using Trusted Computing. In this paper, we discussed Trusted Computing and STP framework in providing the mechanism to check whether hardware, software or application running on the platform behaves as expected without need for further verification. We further discussed different architectures of RTOS and introduced the concept of Trusted Real Time Operating System (TRTOS). The term “behave as expected” needs characterization in operating system behaviours so that we can identify any new properties to be added as TRTOS characteristics during design and implementation. This paper identifies a few of these characteristics and further extends the concept of trust in the realization of RTOS.