Advanced topics in Networks and Distributed Systems Group 10 Shoga Zerihun Ramillo Chenane Question: Write one page

listing the "gaps" discussed in the material and, in your own words, describe if there has been any changes in the underlying assumptions during the last 8 years since the article marked (*) was published. Solution Three types of gaps in embedded systems have been discussed in the material. These are the security processing, battery and assurance gaps. The security processing gap emanates from the fact that the existing embedded system architectures cannot keep up with computational requirements of security processing, due to the complexity of security protocols and increasing data rates. This is mostly felt in systems that perform a lot of transactions, process data at very high rates and systems with medium processing and memory resources. The battery gap on the other hand stems from the fact battery-constrained embedded systems require a lot of energy to support security. The battery gap is mainly triggered by the slow growth rates in battery capacities which are easily surpassed by the appreciating energy requirements for security processing. The assurance gap relates to the gap between functional security measures such as security services, security protocols together with their cryptographic algorithms and the actual implementation of these measures. It is true that major milestones have been achieved in security in embedded systems. Most of these advances are however theoretical. For instance a lot of cryptographic algorithms and secure communication protocols exist but they are rarely implemented in embedded systems to ensure security. This is mainly due to the fact that majority of the real attacks and security threats mainly focus on the security weaknesses in the actual system implementation but not on the theoretical strength of these cryptographic algorithms and security protocols. Security should therefore be implemented during system design process to ensure it is inbuilt but should not be added as an afterthought in an embedded system. It is worth noting that current system implementations have tried to address the challenges highlighted by the author, whereby there is an interplay between flexibility, performance and power consumption while at the same time maintaining high security levels in embedded systems. This is mainly due to the fact that security is being considered in the design phase and therefore is an inbuilt function rather than an afterthought although this comes with a trade off of either extra cost or high turn-around times or both. In-terms of the battery gap, there are power management schemes to help save on power, for instance including dormant and active mode so that power is only consumed when a system in active mode. We therefore believe there have been some changes from the authors assumptions but still a lot needs to be done, including the implementation of most of these theoretical strong cryptographic algorithms and security protocols.