1 - 3 September | Vancouver, Canada BC View More Details & Registration The schedule is subject to change, so please check back before the event for the most up-to-date information.
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ABB develops protection and control systems for safety-critical infrastructure in energy and transportation sectors. These systems operate under hard real-time constraints, require security and safety assurances, and incorporate legacy software developed over decades by multiple teams across heterogeneous operating systems. Recently, regulatory requirements like the EU Cyber Resilience Act [1] demand timely and continuous software updates over long system lifetimes. This poses numerous challenges for the platform architecture and certification strategies.
The presentation reports on experiences gained while evaluating a mixed-criticality platform based on seL4 [2], [3]. The focus is on consolidating hard real-time, safety-critical protection and control functions with non-critical services on shared hardware, while preserving determinism and isolation. An architectural mechanism is also presented that enables software updates of non-safety-critical components without violating the isolation, timing, and trust assumptions of certified functions. This supports regulatory compliance while minimizing recertification effort. Based on this experience, the presentation discusses lessons learned, limitations, and open challenges encountered when implementing seL4 for such real-time, secured, and legacy-driven protection and control systems.
[1] Council of the European Union, “Regulation (EU) 2024/2847.” 2024. Available: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/2847/oj
[2] G. Klein et al., “seL4: Formal verification of an OS kernel,” 2009.
[3] Z. Kocsis, M. Paturel, S. Isitha, T. Weibel, and G. Heiser, “The Sel4 Microkit,” 2023.
