Concurrent Reactive Objects in Rust Secure by Construction

• Embedded systems of the IoT era face the software developer with requirements on a mix of resource efficiency, real-time, safety, and security properties. As of today, C/C++ programming dominates the mainstream of embedded development, which leaves ensuring system wide properties mainly at the hands of the programmer. We adopt a programming model and accompanying framework implementation that leverages on the memory model, type system, and zero-cost abstractions of the Rust language. Based on the outset of reactivity, a software developer models a system in terms of Concurrent Reactive Objects (CROs) hierarchically grouped into Concurrent Reactive Components (CRCs) with communication captured in terms of time constrained synchronous and asynchronous messages. The developer declaratively defines the system, from which a static system instance can be derived and analyzed. A system designed in the proposed CRC framework has the outstanding properties of efficient, memory safe, race-, and deadlock-free preemptive (single-core) execution with predictable real-time properties. In this paper, we further explore the Rust memory model and the CRC framework towards systems being secure by construction. In particular, we show that permissions granted can be freely delegated without any risk of leakage outside the intended set of components. Moreover, the model guarantees permissions to be authentic, i.e., neither manipulated nor faked. Finally, the model guarantees permissions to be temporal, i.e., never to outlive the granted authority. We believe and argue that these properties offer the fundamental primitives for building secure by construction applications and demonstrate its feasibility on a small case study, a wireless autonomous system based on an ARM Cortex M3 target.

Ämnesord

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Datavetenskap (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Computer Sciences (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Dependable Communication and Computation Systems

Kommunikations- och beräkningssystem

Publikations- och innehållstyp

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