Biblio

IoT technology is finding new applications every day and everywhere in our daily lives. With that, come new use cases with new challenges in terms of device and data security. One of such challenges arises from the fact that many IoT devices/nodes are no longer being deployed on owners' premises, but rather on public or private property other than the owner's. With potential physical access to the IoT node, adversaries can launch many attacks that circumvent conventional protection methods. In this paper, we propose Secure SoC (SecSoC), a secure system-on-chip architecture that mitigates such attacks. This include logical memory dump attacks, bus snooping attacks, and compromised operating systems. SecSoC relies on two main mechanisms, (1) providing security extensions to the compute engine that runs the user application without changing its instruction set, (2) adding a security management unit (SMU) that provide HW security primitives for encryption, hashing, random number generators, and secrets store (keys, certificates, etc.). SecSoC ensures that no secret or sensitive data can leave the SoC IC in plaintext. SecSoC is being implemented in Bluespec System V erilog. The experimental results will reveal the area, power, and cycle time overhead of these security extensions. Overall performance (total execution time) will also be evaluated using IoT benchmarks.

Using security primitives, a novel scheme for licensing hardware intellectual properties (HWIPs) on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) in public clouds is proposed. The proposed scheme enforces a pay-per-use model, allows HWIP's installation only on specific on-cloud FPGAs, and efficiently protects the HWIPs from being cloned, reverse engineered, or used without the owner's authorization by any party, including a cloud insider. It also provides protection for the users' designs integrated with the HWIP on the same FPGA. This enables cloud tenants to license HWIPs in the cloud from the HWIP vendors at a relatively low price based on usage instead of paying the expensive unlimited HWIP license fee. The scheme includes a protocol for FPGA authentication, HWIP secure decryption, and usage by the clients without the need for the HWIP vendor to be involved or divulge their secret keys. A complete prototype test-bed implementation showed that the proposed scheme is very feasible with relatively low resource utilization. Experiments also showed that a HWIP could be licensed and set up in the on-cloud FPGA in 0.9s. This is 15 times faster than setting up the same HWIP from outside the cloud, which takes about 14s based on the average global Internet speed.