Software Test Attacks to Break Mobile and Embedded Devices

Chapter 6

Time Attacks

“It’s about Time”

This chapter considers time with respect to the system or other major elements in the system and software. Time is an interesting topic and is often called the fourth dimension, so these attacks only poke at that topic.

Embedded software systems often have potential “real-time” problems related to the “clock.” Time can be wall clock time, a date, time between actions, internally represented time, and so on. Time can also be long (years, days, hours, minutes), short (micro- and nanoseconds), and/or combinations of these. When we say “real-time” and “time critical,” we should immediately start asking more questions about what is meant by those references and then begin to examine implications of incorrect ...