Securing Embedded Systems: Analyses of Modern Automotive Systems and Enabling Near-Real Time Dynamic Analysis

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2014Today, our life is pervaded by computer systems embedded inside everyday products. These embedded systems are found in everything from cars to microwave ovens. These systems are becoming increasingly sophisticated and interconnected, both to each other and to the Internet. Unfortunately, it appears that the security implications of this complexity and connectivity have mostly been overlooked, even though ignoring security could have disastrous consequences; since embedded systems control much of our environment, compromised systems could be used to inflict physical harm. This work presents an analysis of security issues in embedded systems, including a comprehensive security analysis of modern automotive systems. We hypothesize that dynamic analysis tools would quickly discover many of the vulnerabilities we found. However, as we will discuss, there are several challenges in applying traditional dynamic analysis tools to embedded systems. We propose and evaluate new tools to overcome these challenges