A case for security-aware design-space exploration of embedded systems

As modern embedded systems are becoming more and more ubiquitous and interconnected, they attract a world-wide attention of attackers and the security aspect is more important than ever during the design of those systems. Moreover, given the ever-increasing complexity of the applications that run on these systems, it becomes increasingly difficult to meet all security criteria. While extra-functional design objectives such as performance and power/energy consumption are typically taken into account already during the very early stages of embedded systems design, system security is still mostly considered as an afterthought. That is, security is usually not regarded in the process of (early) design-space exploration of embedded systems, which is the critical process of multi-objective optimization that aims at optimizing the extra-functional behavior of a design. This position paper argues for the development of techniques for quantifying the ’degree of secureness’ of embedded system design instances such that these can be incorporated in a multi-objective optimization process. Such technology would allow for the optimization of security aspects of embedded systems during the earliest design phases as well as for studying the trade-offs between security and the other design objectives such as performance, power consumption and cost.