Mitigating Message Passing Interference in Trusted Embedded Platforms

Message passing (MP) hardware usually uses a fixed-size message buffer, which removes the need for resource consuming connection state. However, buffers may overflow and stall further incoming messages, jamming the communication fabric, and possibly impeding communication on the whole platform. The prevention of communication channel interference is especially important for the isolation of applications in a distributed operating system environment. By jamming the inevitably shared communication fabric one application may be able to obstruct the progression of another application (cf. denial-of-service attack), thus breaking isolation. In this work we propose a reject-and-resend mechanism for embedded MP hardware, increasing the robustness of the communication fabric by preventing jamming. It drastically lowers communication interference, while keeping the low cost and low latency, connectionless communication of common MP hardware solutions.