Establishing cyber resilience in embedded systems for securing next-generation critical infrastructure

The mass integration and deployment of intelligent technologies within critical commercial, industrial and public environments have a significant impact on business operations and society as a whole. Though integration of these critical intelligent technologies pose serious embedded security challenges for technology manufacturers which are required to be systematically approached, in-line with international security regulations.
This paper presents the security foundation for such intelligent technologies by presenting core security functions laid out by international security authorities. For each core security function, the embedded security requirements have been derived, which can be used to establish cyber resilience in embedded systems. A review of existing embedded security methods, microarchitectures and design practises is presented to map the driven embedded security requirements onto existing embedded security landscape and to identify their shortcomings to support the core security functions. They have been found ad-hoc, passive and strongly rely on building and maintaining trust. To the best of our knowledge to date, no existing embedded security microarchitecture or defence mechanism provides continuity of data stream or security once trust has broken. This step is crucial for embedded technologies deployed in critical infrastructure to enhance and maintain security, and to gain evidence of the security breach to effectively evaluate, improve and deploy active response and mitigation strategies. To this end, the paper proposes three microarchitectural characteristics that shall be designed and integrated into embedded architectures to establish, maintain and improve cyber resilience in embedded systems for next generation critical infrastructure.