Title
Data-driven Anomaly Detection with Timing Features for Embedded Systems
Abstract
Malware is a serious threat to network-connected embedded systems, as evidenced by the continued and rapid growth of such devices, commonly referred to as the Internet of Things. Their ubiquitous use in critical applications require robust protection to ensure user safety and privacy. That protection must be applied to all system aspects, extending beyond protecting the network and external interfaces. Anomaly detection is one of the last lines of defence against malware, in which data-driven approaches that require the least domain knowledge are popular. However, embedded systems, particularly edge devices, face several challenges in applying data-driven anomaly detection, including unpredictability of malware, limited tolerance to long data collection windows, and limited computing/energy resources. In this article, we utilize subcomponent timing information of software execution, including intrinsic software execution, instruction cache misses, and data cache misses as features, to detect anomalies based on ranges, multi-dimensional Euclidean distance, and classification at runtime. Detection methods based on lumped timing range are also evaluated and compared. We design several hardware detectors implementing these data-driven detection methods, which non-intrusively measuring lumped/subcomponent timing of all system/function calls of the embedded application. We evaluate the area, power, and detection latency of the presented detector designs. Experimental results demonstrate that the subcomponent timing model provides sufficient features to achieve high detection accuracy with low false-positive rates using a one-class support vector machine, considering sophisticated mimicry malware.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3279949
ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
One-class SVM, anomaly detection, embedded system security, software security, timing-based detection
Anomaly detection,Data-driven,Domain knowledge,Computer science,Cache,Software security assurance,Support vector machine,Real-time computing,Edge device,Malware,Embedded system
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
24
3
1084-4309
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.38
0
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sixing Lu1102.33
Roman Lysecky260560.43