Biblio

Fully homomorphic encryption technologies allow you to operate on encrypted data without disclosing it, therefore they have a lot of potential for solving personal data storage and processing issues. Because of the increased interest in these technologies, various software tools and libraries that allow completely homomorphic encryption have emerged. However, because this subject of cryptography is still in its early stages, standards and recommendations for the usage of completely homomorphic encryption algorithms are still being developed. The paper presents the main areas of application of homomorphic encryption. The analysis of existing developments in the field of homomorphic encryption is carried out. The analysis showed that existing library implementations do not support the division and subtraction operation. The analysis revealed the need to develop a library of fully homomorphic encryption, which allows performing all mathematical operations on them (addition, difference, multiplication and division), as well as the relevance of developing its own implementation of a library of homomorphic encryption on integers. Then, implement the development of a fully homomorphic encryption library in C++ and on an ESP 32 microcontroller. The ability to perform four operations (addition, difference, multiplication and division) on encrypted data will expand the scope of application of homomorphic encryption. A method of homomorphic division and subtraction is proposed that allows performing the division and subtraction operation on homomorphically encrypted data. The level of security, the types of operations executed, the maximum length of operands, and the algorithm's running time are all described as a consequence of numerical experimentation with parameters.

Embedded Systems - the hidden computers in our lives - are deployed in the billionths and are already in the focus of attackers. They pose security risks when not tested and maintained thoroughly. In recent years, fuzzing has become a promising technique for automated security testing of programs, which can generate tons of test inputs for a program. Fuzzing is hardly applied to embedded systems, because of their high diversity and closed character. During my research I want tackle that gap in fuzzing embedded systems - short: “Embedded Fuzzing”. My goal is to obtain insights of the embedded system during execution, by using common debugging interfaces and hardware breakpoints to enable guided fuzzing in a generic and widely applicable way. Debugging interfaces and hardware breakpoints are available for most common microcontrollers, generating a potential industry impact. Preliminary results show that the approach covers basic blocks faster than blackbox fuzzing. Additionally, it is source code agnostic and leaves the embedded firmware unaltered.

Side Channel Attacks (SCAs), an attack that exploits the physical information generated when an encryption algorithm is executed on a device to recover the key, has become one of the key threats to the security of encrypted devices. Recently, with the development of deep learning, deep learning techniques have been applied to SCAs with good results on publicly available dataset experiences. In this paper, we propose a power traces decomposition method that divides the original power traces into two parts, where the data-influenced part is defined as data power traces (Tdata) and the other part is defined as device constant power traces, and use the Tdata for training the network model, which has more obvious advantages than using the original power traces for training the network model. To verify the effectiveness of the approach, we evaluated the ATXmega128D4 microcontroller by capturing the power traces generated when implementing AES-128. Experimental results show that network models trained using Tdata outperform network models trained using raw power traces (Traw ) in terms of classification accuracy, training time, cross-subkey recovery key, and cross-device recovery key.

Nowadays, safety systems are an important feature for modern vehicles. Many accidents would have been occurred without them. In comparison with older vehicles, modern vehicles have a much better crumple zone, more airbags, a better braking system, as well as a much better and safer driving behaviour. Although, the vehicles safety systems are working well in these days, there is still space for improvement and for adding new security features. This paper describes the implementation of an Intelligent Caravan Monitoring System (ICMS) using the Controller Area Network (CAN), for the communication between the vehicle’s electronic system and the trailer’s electronic system. Furthermore, a comparison between the communication technology of this paper and a previous published paper will be made. The new system is faster, more flexible and more energy efficient.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly evolving, allowing physical items to share information and coordinate with other nodes, increasing IoT’s value and being widely applied to various applications. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is usually used in IoT applications to automate item identification by establishing symmetrical communication between the tag device and the reader. Because RFID reading data is typically in plain text, a security mechanism is required to ensure that the reading results from this RFID data remain confidential. Researchers propose a lightweight encryption algorithm framework for IoT-based RFID applications to address this security issue. Furthermore, this research assesses the implementation of lightweight encryption algorithms, such as Grain v1 and Espresso, as two systems scenarios. The Grain v1 encryption is the final eSTREAM project that accepts an 80-bit key, 64-bit IV, and has a 160-bit internal state with limited application. In contrast, the Espresso algorithm has been implemented in various applications such as 5G wireless communication. Furthermore, this paper tested the performance of each encryption algorithm in the microcontroller and inspected the network performance in an IoT system.

Microcontroller-based embedded systems have become ubiquitous with the emergence of IoT technology. Given its critical roles in many applications, its security is becoming increasingly important. Unfortunately, MCU devices are especially vulnerable. Code reuse attacks are particularly noteworthy since the memory address of firmware code is static. This work seeks to combat code reuse attacks, including ROP and more advanced JIT-ROP via continuous randomization. Previous proposals are geared towards full-fledged OSs with rich runtime environments, and therefore cannot be applied to MCUs. We propose the first solution for ARM-based MCUs. Our system, named HARM, comprises a secure runtime and a binary analysis tool with rewriting module. The secure runtime, protected inside the secure world, proactively triggers and performs non-bypassable randomization to the firmware running in a sandbox in the normal world. Our system does not rely on any firmware feature, and therefore is generally applicable to both bare-metal and RTOS-powered firmware. We have implemented a prototype on a development board. Our evaluation results indicate that HARM can effectively thaw code reuse attacks while keeping the performance and energy overhead low.

The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to introduce pervasive computation into the human environment. The processing on a cloud platform is suggested due to the IoT devices' resource limitations. High latency while transmitting IoT data from its edge network to the cloud is the primary limitation. Modern IoT applications frequently use fog computing, an unique architecture, as a replacement for the cloud since it promises faster reaction times. In this work, a fog layer is introduced in smart vital sign monitor design in order to serve faster. Context aware computing makes use of environmental or situational data around the object to invoke proactive services upon its usable content. Here in this work the fog layer is intended to provide local data storage, data preprocessing, context awareness and timely analysis.

As the effects of climate change are becoming more and more evident, the importance of improved situation awareness is also gaining more attention, both in the context of preventive environmental monitoring and in the context of acute crisis response. One important aspect of situation awareness is the correct and thorough monitoring of air pollutants. The monitoring is threatened by sensor faults, power or network failures, or other hazards leading to missing or incorrect data transmission. For this reason, in this work we propose two complementary approaches for predicting missing sensor data and a combined technique for detecting outliers. The proposed solution can enhance the performance of low-cost sensor systems, closing the gap of missing measurements due to network unavailability, detecting drift and outliers thus paving the way to its use as an alert system for reportable events. The techniques have been deployed and tested also in a low power microcontroller environment, verifying the suitability of such a computing power to perform the inference locally, leading the way to an edge implementation of a virtual sensor digital twin.

Internet of Things (IoT) is a sophisticated concept of the traditional internet. In IoT, all things in our lives can be connected with the internet or with each other to exchange data and perform specific functions through the network. However, combining several devices-especially by unskilled users-may pose a number of security risks. In addition, some commonly used communication protocols in the IoT area are not secure. Security, on the other hand, increases overhead by definition, resulting in performance degradation. The Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol is a lightweight protocol and can be considered as one of the most popular IoT protocols, it is a publish/subscribe messaging transport protocol that uses a client-server architecture. MQTT is built to run over TCP protocol, thus it does not provide any level of security by default. Therefore, Transport Layer Security (TLS) can be used to ensure the security of the MQTT protocol. This paper analyzed the impact on the performance and security of the MQTT protocol in two cases. The first case, when using TLS protocol to support the security of the MQTT protocol. The second case, using the traditional MQTT without providing any level of security for the exchanged data. The results indicated that there is a tradeoff between the performance and the security when using MQTT protocol with and without the presence of TLS protocol.

Recent controlled-channel attacks exploit timing differences in the rudimentary fetch-decode-execute logic of processors. These new attacks also pose a threat to software on embedded systems. Even when Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are used, interrupt latency attacks allow untrusted code to extract application secrets from a vulnerable enclave by scheduling interruption of the enclave. Constant-time programming is effective against these attacks but, as we explain in this paper, can come with some disadvantages regarding performance. To deal with this new threat, we propose a novel algorithm that hardens programs during compilation by aligning the execution time of corresponding instructions in secret-dependent branches. Our results show that, on a class of embedded systems with deterministic execution times, this approach eliminates interrupt latency side-channel leaks and mitigates limitations of constant-time programming. We have implemented our approach in the LLVM compiler infrastructure for the San-cus TEE, which extends the openMSP430 microcontroller, and we discuss applicability to other architectures. We make our implementation and benchmarks available for further research.

This paper emphasizes the implementation of a conditioning circuit specific for an inductive or capacitive sensor. There are some inductive sensors, such as the proximity sensor, for which the inductance is dependent with the distance, or capacitive sensors strongly dependent with the humidity, distance, etc. This category of sensors is suitable for AC domain excitation from the measurement procedure point of view. Taking into consideration the fabrication technology, the measured physical quantity is being encoded as frequency or amplitude. To generate a sinusoidal signal with constant frequency and amplitude, the Colpitts or Hartley oscillators can be used [1], [2]. But the novelty of this paper is a different approach which reveals a microcontroller-based technology where the LC circuit works in an oscillating regime even though there is an underdamped oscillation behavior. For the oscillations’ occurrence, there will be a periodical energy injection using a driving source. One of the main advantages of the mentioned circuit is the small component number. The central unit of the embedded system will fulfil two functions: maintains the oscillating regime and measures the amplitude or frequency of the output signal. In this way, the built embedded system will be robust and easy to use due to its software configuration capabilities. As a plus, such a system can measure additional sensors used in environment parameters’ compensating procedure.

This project develops a face recognition-based door locking system with two-factor authentication using OpenCV. It uses Raspberry Pi 4 as the microcontroller. Face recognition-based door locking has been around for many years, but most of them only provide face recognition without any added security features, and they are costly. The design of this project is based on human face recognition and the sending of a One-Time Password (OTP) using the Twilio service. It will recognize the person at the front door. Only people who match the faces stored in its dataset and then inputs the correct OTP will have access to unlock the door. The Twilio service and image processing algorithm Local Binary Pattern Histogram (LBPH) has been adopted for this system. Servo motor operates as a mechanism to access the door. Results show that LBPH takes a short time to recognize a face. Additionally, if an unknown face is detected, it will log this instance into a "Fail" file and an accompanying CSV sheet.

Multi-processors System-on-Chip (MPSoC) are a key enabling technology for different applications characterized by hyper-connectivity and multi-tenant requirements, where resources are shared and communication is ubiquitous. In such an environment, security plays a major role. To cope with these security needs, MPSoCs usually integrate cryptographic functionalities deployed as software and/or hardware solutions. Quantum computing represents a threat for the current cryptography. To overcome such a threat, Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) can be used, thus ensuring the long term security of different applications. Since 2017, NIST is running a PQC standardization process. While the focus has been the security analysis of the different PQC candidates and the software implementation, the MPSoC PQC implementation has been neglected. To this end, this work presents two contributions. First, the exploration of the multicore capabilities for developing optimized PQC implementations. As a use case, NTRU lattice-based PQC, finalist for the NIST standardization process, is discussed. Second, NTRU was deployed on an AURIX microcontroller of Infineon Technologies AG with the Real-Time Operating System PXROS-HR from HighTec EDV-Systeme GmbH. Results show that NTRU can be efficiently implemented and optimized on a multicore architecture, improving the performance up to 43% when compared to single core solutions.

This paper presents LIRA-V, a lightweight system for performing remote attestation between constrained devices using the RISC-V architecture. We propose using read-only memory and the RISC-V Physical Memory Protection (PMP) primitive to build a trust anchor for remote attestation and secure channel creation. Moreover, we show how LIRA-V can be used for trusted communication between two devices using mutual attestation. We present the design, implementation and evaluation of LIRA-V using an off-the-shelf RISC-V microcontroller and present performance results to demonstrate its suitability. To our knowledge, we present the first remote attestation mechanism suitable for constrained RISC-V devices, with applications to cyber-physical systems and Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

This work focuses on the design and implementation of a microcontroller for apply all the knowledge acquired during Engineering Electronics career. In order to improve the knowledge about RF technologies, security system have been created, which increases the number of applications used in these days. This design utilizes light sensors as the end device for detecting any changes of resistance. The results show that the designed system can send and receive data until 100 meters of distance between module sides (receiver-transmitter). This security system designed using PIC 16F84 microcontroller as entire brain of the system with sensors, has been successfully designed and implement considering some factors such as economy, availability of components and durability in the design process.

IoT is an emerging technology in modern world of communication. As the usage of IoT devices is increasing in day to day life, the secure data communication in IoT environment is the major challenge. Especially, small sized Single-Board Computers (SBCs) or Microcontrollers devices are widely used to transfer data with another in IoT. Due to the less processing power and storage capabilities, the data acquired from these devices must be transferred very securely in order to avoid some ethical issues. There are many cryptography approaches are applied to transfer data between IoT devices, but there are obvious chances to suspect encrypted messages by eavesdroppers. To add more secure data transfer, steganography mechanism is used to avoid the chances of suspicion as another layer of security. Based on the capabilities of IoT devices, low complexity images are used to hide the data with different hiding algorithms. In this research study, the secret data is encoded through QR code and embedded in low complexity cover images by applying image to image hiding fashion. The encoded image is sent to the receiving device via the network. The receiving device extracts the QR code from image using secret key then decoded the original data. The performance measure of the system is evaluated by the image quality parameters mainly Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Normalized Coefficient (NC) and Security with maintaining the quality of contemporary IoT system. Thus, the proposed method hides the precious information within an image using the properties of QR code and sending it without any suspicion to attacker and competes with the existing methods in terms of providing more secure communication between Microcontroller devices in IoT environment.

An open source and low-cost Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition System based on Node-RED and Arduino microcontrollers is presented in this paper. The system is designed for monitoring, supervision, and remotely controlling motors and sensors deployed for oil and gas facilities. The Internet of Things (IoT) based SCADA system consists of a host computer on which a server is deployed using the Node-RED programming tool and two terminal units connected to it: Arduino Uno and Arduino Mega. The Arduino Uno collects and communicates the data acquired from the temperature, flowrate, and water level sensors to the Node-Red on the computer through the serial port. It also uses a local liquid crystal display (LCD) to display the temperature. Node-RED on the computer retrieves the data from the voltage, current, rotary, accelerometer, and distance sensors through the Arduino Mega. Also, a web-based graphical user interface (GUI) is created using Node-RED and hosted on the local server for parsing the collected data. Finally, an HTTP basic access authentication is implemented using Nginx to control the clients' access from the Internet to the local server and to enhance its security and reliability.

Memory corruption vulnerabilities, mainly present in C and C++ applications, may enable attackers to maliciously take control over the program running on a target machine by forcing it to execute an unintended sequence of instructions present in memory. This is the principle of modern Code-Reuse Attacks (CRAs) and of famous attack paradigms as Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) and Jump-Oriented Programming (JOP). Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) is a promising approach to protect against such runtime attacks. Recently, many CFI-based solutions have been proposed, resorting to both hardware and software implementations. However, many of these solutions are hardly applicable to microcontroller systems, often very resource-limited. The paper presents a generic, portable, and lightweight CFI solution for bare-metal embedded systems, i.e., systems that execute firmware directly from their Flash memory, without any Operating System. The proposed defense mixes software and hardware instrumentation and is based on monitoring the Control-Flow Graph (CFG) with an FPGA connected to the CPU. The solution, applicable in principle to any architecture which disposes of an FPGA, forces all control-flow transfers to be compliant with the CFG, and preserves the execution context from possible corruption when entering unpredictable code such as Interrupt Services Routines (ISR).

Internet of Things (IoT) is experiencing significant growth in the safety-critical applications which have caused new security challenges. These devices are becoming targets for different types of physical attacks, which are exacerbated by their diversity and accessibility. Therefore, there is a strict necessity to support embedded software developers to identify and remediate the vulnerabilities and create resilient applications against such attacks. In this paper, we propose a hardware security vulnerability assessment based on fault injection of an embedded application. In our security assessment, we apply a fault injection attack by using our clock glitch generator on a critical medical IoT device. Furthermore, we analyze the potential risks of ignoring these attacks in this embedded application. The results will inform the embedded software developers of various security risks and the required steps to improve the security of similar MCU-based applications. Our hardware security assessment approach is easy to apply and can lead to secure embedded IoT applications against fault attacks.

This paper presents BackFlow, a compiler-based toolchain that enforces indirect backward edge control flow integrity for low-end ARM Cortex-M microprocessors. BackFlow is implemented within the Clang/LLVM compiler and supports the ARM instruction set and its subset Thumb. The control flow integrity generated by the compiler relies on a bitmap, where each set bit indicates a valid pointer destination. The efficiency of the framework is benchmarked using an STM32 NUCLEO F446RE microcontroller. The obtained results show that the control flow integrity solution incurs an execution time overhead ranging from 1.5 to 4.5%.

The use of a very wide windows operating system is undeniably also followed by increasing attacks on the operating system. Universal Serial Bus (USB) is one of the mechanisms used by many people with plug and play functionality that is very easy to use, making data transfers fast and easy compared to other hardware. Some research shows that the Windows operating system has weaknesses so that it is often exploited by using various attacks and malware. There are various methods used to exploit the Windows operating system, one of them by using a USB device. By using a USB device, a criminal can plant a backdoor reverse shell to exploit the victim's computer just by connecting the USB device to the victim's computer without being noticed. This research was conducted by planting a reverse shell backdoor through a USB device to exploit the victim's device, especially the webcam and microphone device on the target computer. From 35 experiments that have been carried out, it was found that 83% of spying attacks using USB devices on the Windows operating system were successfully carried out.

Smart home is one application of the pervasive computing branch of science. Three categories of smart homes, namely comfort, healthcare, and security. The security system is a part of smart home technology that is very important because the intensity of crime is increasing, especially in residential areas. The system will detect the face by the webcam camera if the user enters the correct password. Face recognition will be processed by the Raspberry pi 3 microcontroller with the Principal Component Analysis method using OpenCV and Python software which has outputs, namely actuators in the form of a solenoid lock door and buzzer. The test results show that the webcam can perform face detection when the password input is successful, then the buzzer actuator can turn on when the database does not match the data taken by the webcam or the test data and the solenoid door lock actuator can run if the database matches the test data taken by the sensor. webcam. The mean response time of face detection is 1.35 seconds.

Home automation is an intelligent, functional as a unit system that facilitates home processes without unnecessarily complicating the user's life. Devices can be connected, which in turn connect and talk through a centralized control unit, which are accessible via mobile phones. These devices include lights, appliances, security systems, alarms and many other sensors and devices. This paper presents the design and implementation of a Bluetooth based smart home automation system which uses a Peripheral interface controller (PIC) microcontroller (16F1937) as the main processer and the appliances are connected to the peripheral ports of the microcontroller via relays. The circuit in the project was designed in Diptrace software. The PCB layout design was completed. The fully functional smart home prototype was built and demonstrated to functional.

Robots are networks of a variety of computing devices, such as powerful computing platforms but also tiny microcontrollers. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is the dominant framework for powerful computing devices. While ROS version 2 adds important features like quality of service and security, it cannot be directly applied to microcontrollers because of its large memory footprint. The micro-ROS project has ported the ROS 2 API to microcontrollers. However, the standard ROS 2 concepts are not enough for real-time performance: In the ROS 2 release “Foxy”, the standard ROS 2 Executor, which is the central component responsible for handling timers and incoming message data, is neither real-time capable nor deterministic. Domain-specific requirements of mobile robots, like sense-plan-act control loops, cannot be addressed with the standard ROS 2 Executor. In this paper, we present an advanced Executor for the ROS 2 C API which provides deterministic scheduling and supports domain-specific requirements. A proof-of-concept is demonstrated on a 32-bit microcontroller.

In light of the problem for garbage cleaning in small water area, an intelligent miniature water surface garbage cleaning robot with unmanned driving and convenient operation is designed. Based on STC12C5A60S2 as the main controller in the design, power module, transmission module and cleaning module are controlled together to realize the function of cleaning and transporting garbage, intelligent remote control of miniature water surface garbage cleaning robot is realized by the WiFi module. Then the prototype is developed and tested, which will verify the rationality of the design. Compared with the traditional manual driving water surface cleaning devices, the designed robot realizes the intelligent control of unmanned driving, and achieves the purpose of saving human resources and reducing labor intensity, and the system operates security and stability, which has certain practical value.