Safety & Security monitoring convergence at the dawn of Open Hardware

The emergence of multi-core processors into the embedded world one decade ago led to the IT/OT convergence. In the last few years, a second convergence is ongoing in the domains of safety-critical and security-critical systems. Nowadays both safety protection systems and security protection systems are relying on monitoring to ensure the expected critical software behaviour. However, all these systems incur a performance overhead to fulfill the service, that could be an issue with time-critical systems.

The safety monitoring process that was mostly involved at design time, focusing both on the software and the hardware to ensure hard real-time behaviour and propose some mitigation to faults and errors, is now also targeting the integration and deployment phases with adaptive runtime engines to deal with the timing interference issue of multi-core architectures.

The security monitoring process that was mostly used to focus on protecting against software vulnerabilities at runtime now has to consider unreliable hardware that some cyberthreats such as Spectre and Meltdown are able to exploit.

This paper proposes a short survey of existing Heath \& Usage Monitoring Systems (HUMS) and Hardware Intrusion Detection Systems (HIDS) in safety-critical and security-critical systems, and their associated monitoring features.

We then promote the benefits of communalizing these monitoring features to reduce the performance impact of HUMS and HIDS systems. In this context, open hardware architectures are a major opportunity, allowing us to analyze the hardware design without black box, to seek formal proof of critical properties, to implement mechanisms for improved predictability, and to enhance hardware-level observability.