Protecting Embedded Systems from Zero-Day Attacks

Recently, a quiet revolution in embedded systems technology has occurred with the appearance of System-on-Chip (SoC) devices. These couple Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) logic, with a broad array of peripherals, encryption hardware, and high-performance multi-core processors - all within the boundary of a single chip. This innovation has been accompanied by a coming-of-age in High-Level Synthesis, enabling hardware-software co-design in a systems programming language, such as C. Concurrently, the emergence of light-weight OCI-compliant containers have revolutionized the distribution and maintenance of vertically integrated software stacks. This short position paper explores how these advances can be leveraged to improve the security of embedded systems and, in particular, protect against sophisticated attacks employing kernel-level, zero-day exploits.