Biblio

Recent technological advancements have enabled proliferated use of small embedded and IoT devices for collecting, processing, and transferring the security-critical information and user data. This exponential use has acted as a catalyst in the recent growth of sophisticated attacks such as the replay, man-in-the-middle, and malicious code modification to slink, leak, tweak or exploit the security-critical information in malevolent activities. Therefore, secure communication and software state assurance (at run-time and boot-time) of the device has emerged as open security problems. Furthermore, these devices need to have an appropriate recovery mechanism to bring them back to the known-good operational state. Previous researchers have demonstrated independent methods for attack detection and safeguard. However, the majority of them lack in providing onboard system recovery and secure communication techniques. To bridge this gap, this manuscript proposes SRACARE - a framework that utilizes the custom lightweight, secure communication protocol that performs remote/local attestation, and secure boot with an onboard resilience recovery mechanism to protect the devices from the above-mentioned attacks. The prototype employs an efficient lightweight, low-power 32-bit RISC-V processor, secure communication protocol, code authentication, and resilience engine running on the Artix 7 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) board. This work presents the performance evaluation and state-of-the-art comparison results, which shows promising resilience to attacks and demonstrate the novel protection mechanism with onboard recovery. The framework achieves these with only 8% performance overhead and a very small increase in hardware-software footprint.

Realization of an application using Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) using Sensor Nodes (SNs) brings in profound advantages of ad-hoc and flexible network deployments. Implementation of these networks face immense challenges due to short wireless range; along with limited power, storage & computational capabilities of SNs. Also, due to the tiny physical attributes of the SNs in WSNs, they are prone to physical attacks. In the context of WSNs, the physical attacks may range from destroying, lifting, replacing and adding new SNs. The work in this paper addresses the threats induced due to physical attacks and, further proposes a methodology to mitigate it. The methodology incorporates the use of newly proposed secured and efficient symmetric and asymmetric key distribution technique based on the additional commodity hardware Trusted Platform Module (TPM). Further, the paper demonstrates the merits of the proposed methodology. With some additional economical cost for the hardware, the proposed technique can fulfill the security requirement of WSNs, like confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, resilience to attack, key connectivity and data freshness.