The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Benchmark for Security Testing on Embedded Systems

With the growing popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT), embedded devices continue to integrate more into our daily lives. For this reason, security for embedded devices is a vital issue to address. Attacks such as stack smashing, code injection, data corruption and Return Oriented Programming (ROP) are still a threat to embedded systems. As new methods are developed to defend embedded systems against such attacks, a benchmark to compare these methods is not present. In this work, a benchmark is presented that is aimed at testing the security of new techniques that defend against these common attacks. Two programs are developed that carry three key values needed for a benchmark: realistic embedded application, complex control flow, and being deterministic. The first application is a pin lock system and the second is a compression data logger. A complexity evaluation of the two applications revealed that the pin lock system contained 171 functions and 190 nodes with 252 edges in the control-flow graph, and the compression data logger contained 192 functions and 1,357 nodes with 2,123 edges in the control-flow graph. The current benchmark will be improved in the future by adding more applications with a wider range of complexity.