A Container-based DoS Attack-Resilient Control Framework for Real-Time UAV Systems
Jiyang Chen1, Zhiwei Feng2,1, Jen-Yang Wen1, Bo Liu3 and and Lui Sha1
1Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
2School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, China
3Coordinated Science Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
ABSTRACT
The Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) sector is fastexpanding. Protection of real-time UAV applications against malicious attacks has become an urgent problem that needs to be solved. Denial-of-service (DoS) attack aims to exhaust system resources and cause important tasks to miss deadlines. DoS attack may be one of the common problems of UAV systems, due to its simple implementation. In this paper, we present a software framework that offers DoS attack-resilient control for real-time UAV systems using containers: ContainerDrone. The framework provides defense mechanisms for three critical system resources: CPU, memory, and communication channel. We restrict attacker's access to CPU core set and utilization. Memory bandwidth throttling limits attacker's memory usage. By simulating sensors and drivers in the container, a security monitor constantly checks DoS attacks over communication channels. Upon the detection of a security rule violation, the framework switches to the safety controller to mitigate the attack. We implemented a prototype quadcopter with commercially offthe-shelf (COTS) hardware and open-source software. Our experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed framework defending against various DoS attacks.
Keywords: Cyber Physical System, Real-time System, Denial of Service attack, Linux Container, Simplex, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Systems, Security.
