Safe and Secure I/O Sharing for Mixed-Criticality Embedded Real-Time Systems for Avionics

Avionic systems are characterized by the trend to save space, weight and power and the trend to a higher functional integration. This leads from the federated system architecture of dedicated systems to the Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) architecture and to mixed-criticality systems. The objective and challenge is to provide an I/O sharing solution for mixed-criticality systems. The focus is on safety and considers security for system integrity and availability. A particular challenge is that available embedded processing architectures lack separation means. The main contribution is a certification-relevant and practically evaluated I/O sharing solution targeting temporal separation and especially spatial separation. Particular benefits are that only commercially available standard-compatible components are used. This enables a reusable, portable and scalable solution which complies with various computing architectures like Intel, ARM and PowerPC.