Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 10 Jun 2010 11:29:46 -0600 | Subject | Aerospace and linux | From | Brian Gordon <> |
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Greetings,
I work in the aerospace industry and one of the considerations that occurs in aerospace is a phenomenon called Single Event Upsets (SEU). I'm not an expert on the physics behind this phenomenon, but the end result is that bits in RAM change state due to high energy particles passing through the device. This phenomenon happens more often at higher altitudes (aircraft) and is a very serious consideration for space vehicles.
When these SEU can be detected some action may be taken to improve the behaviour of the system (log a fault and reset in order to refresh things from scratch?). So the first question becomes how to detect an SEU. Flash is considered somewhat safer than RAM. When executables run in linux, do the .text and .ro sections get copied into RAM? If so, can a background task monitor the RAM copy of .text and .ro for corruption? Tripwire seems to offer this kind of detection as a means for detecting tampering by a malicious attacker in the filesystem, but I am not convinced that it would detect modifications to copies of the ELF in RAM.
My understanding how linux does "on-demand" loading of executables may be a problem here. But this SEU detection capability would seem to have some applicability to intrusion detection, so I have to think some mechanism already exists.
Thank you to anyone for any pointers on where I can look to learn more about detecting SEU in linux.
legerde at gmail com
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