Work-in-Progress: Improving Security and Maintainability in Modular Embedded Systems with Hardware Support

The current trend of transforming static embedded systems into open platforms (in which several software providers are able to directly load their software) drives the need to design and implement modular embedded software. Additionally, a myriad of embedded devices are expected to operate and provide services for years, or even decades, while remaining correct and secure at all times. Therefore, one of the emerging challenges for highly adaptive embedded computing platforms is to offer dynamic software composition at runtime and internal device housekeeping, which in conjunction improve device maintainability. We propose a hardware/software co-designed technique to improve both security and maintainability in modular embedded systems.