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1. Solar Cell Based Physically Unclonable Function for Cybersecurity in IoT Devices

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ISVLSI.2018.00131  

   Kumar, S. Dinesh ; Labrado, Carson ; Badhan, Riasad ; Thapliyal, Himanshu ; Singh, Vijay ( July 2018 , 2018 IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI))

   Internet of Things (IoT) devices are mostly small and operate wirelessly on limited battery supply, and therefore have stringent constraints on power consumption and hardware resources. Therefore, energy-efficient (low energy) design is paramount for the successful deployment of resource constrained IoT devices. Further, Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have evolved as a popular hardware security primitive for low cost, mass produced IoT devices with very constrained resources. Energy harvesting technologies utilizing solar cells are being used in ultra-low power IoT devices to satisfy the energy requirement. In this paper, we utilize the intrinsic variations in solar cells to design a novel solar cell based PUF. As a proof of concept, we have used the Tiva TM4C123GH6PM microcontroller to build our solar cell based PUF. From our experiments, we found that the proposed solar cell based PUF has the uniformity value of 49.21% which is close to the ideal value of 50%. Further, the proposed solar cell based PUF has worst case reliabilities of 92.97% and 90.62% with variations in temperature and light intensity, respectively.
2. Enable Fair Proof-of-Work (PoW) Consensus for Blockchains in IoT by Miner Twins (MinT)

   https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13110291  

   Qu, Qian ; Xu, Ronghua ; Chen, Yu ; Blasch, Erik ; Aved, Alexander ( November 2021 , Future Internet)

   Blockchain technology has been recognized as a promising solution to enhance the security and privacy of Internet of Things (IoT) and Edge Computing scenarios. Taking advantage of the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus protocol, which solves a computation intensive hashing puzzle, Blockchain ensures the security of the system by establishing a digital ledger. However, the computation intensive PoW favors members possessing more computing power. In the IoT paradigm, fairness in the highly heterogeneous network edge environments must consider devices with various constraints on computation power. Inspired by the advanced features of Digital Twins (DT), an emerging concept that mirrors the lifespan and operational characteristics of physical objects, we propose a novel Miner Twins (MinT) architecture to enable a fair PoW consensus mechanism for blockchains in IoT environments. MinT adopts an edge-fog-cloud hierarchy. All physical miners of the blockchain are deployed as microservices on distributed edge devices, while fog/cloud servers maintain digital twins that periodically update miners’ running status. By timely monitoring of a miner’s footprint that is mirrored by twins, a lightweight Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA)-based detection achieves the identification of individual misbehaved miners that violate fair mining. Moreover, we also design a novel Proof-of-Behavior (PoB) consensus algorithm to detect dishonest minersmore »that collude to control a fair mining network. A preliminary study is conducted on a proof-of-concept prototype implementation, and experimental evaluation shows the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed MinT scheme under a distributed byzantine network environment.« less
3. Use of Thermistor Temperature Sensors for Cyber-Physical System Security

   https://doi.org/10.3390/s19183905  

   Labrado, Carson ; Thapliyal, Himanshu ; Prowell, Stacy ; Kuruganti, Teja ( September 2019 , Sensors)

   The last few decades have seen a large proliferation in the prevalence of cyber-physical systems. This has been especially highlighted by the explosive growth in the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Unfortunately, the increasing prevalence of these devices has begun to draw the attention of malicious entities which exploit them for their own gain. What makes these devices especially attractive is the various resource constraints present in these devices that make it difficult to add standard security features. Therefore, one intriguing research direction is creating security solutions out of already present components such as sensors. Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are one potential solution that use intrinsic variations of the device manufacturing process for provisioning security. In this work, we propose a novel weak PUF design using thermistor temperature sensors. Our design uses the differences in resistance variation between thermistors in response to temperature change. To generate a PUF that is reliable across a range of temperatures, we use a response-generation algorithm that helps mitigate the effects of temperature variation on the thermistors. We tested the performance of our proposed design across a range of environmental operating conditions. From this we were able to evaluate the reliability of themore »proposed PUF with respect to variations in temperature and humidity. We also evaluated the PUF’s uniqueness using Monte Carlo simulations.« less
4. Reconfigurable Network-on-Chip Security Architecture

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3406661  

   Charles, Subodha ; Mishra, Prabhat ( October 2020 , ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems)

   Growth of the Internet-of-things has led to complex system-on-chips (SoCs) being used in the edge devices in IoT applications. The increased complexity is demanding designers to consider several critical factors, such as dynamic requirement changes, long application life, mass production, and tight time-to-market deadlines. These requirements lead to more complex security concerns. SoC manufacturers outsource some of the intellectual property cores integrated on the SoC to untrusted third-party vendors. The untrusted intellectual properties can contain malicious implants, which can launch attacks using the resources provided by the on-chip interconnection network, commonly known as the network-on-chip (NoC). Existing efforts on securing NoC have considered lightweight encryption, authentication, and other attack detection mechanisms such as denial-of-service and buffer overflows. Unfortunately, these approaches focus on designing statically optimized security solutions. As a result, they are not suitable for many IoT systems with long application life and dynamic requirement changes. There is a critical need to design reconfigurable security architectures that can be dynamically tuned based on changing requirements. In this article, we propose a tier-based reconfigurable security architecture that can adapt to different use-case scenarios. We explore how to design an efficient reconfigurable architecture that can support three popular NoC security mechanisms (encryption,more »authentication, and denial-of-service attack detection and localization) and implement suitable dynamic reconfiguration techniques. We evaluate our proposed framework by running standard benchmarks enabling different tiers of security and provide a comprehensive analysis of how different levels of security can affect application performance, energy efficiency, and area overhead.« less
5. Veda-PUF: A PUF based on Vedic Principles for Robust Lightweight Security for IoT

   https://doi.org/10.1109/iSES52644.2021.00097  

   Yanambaka, Venkata P. ; Mohanty, Saraju P. ; Kougianos, Elias ; Baniya, Babu K. ; Rout, Bibhudutta ( December 2021 , IEEE International Symposium on Smart Electronic Systems (iSES))

   Sahula, Vineet ; Mohanty, Saraju (Ed.)

   This paper proposes a new controlled Physical Unclonable Function (PUF), Veda-PUF, which uses an algorithm for pre-processing and post-processing the input and output of PUF to increase the security of the keys generated in Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. The key size of the PUF can be increased using the proposed protocol without compromising the integrity of the keys generated. The uniqueness of the generated keys was 50 % and the reliability of the keys generated is 99.9 % which are close to the ideal values. The proposed control algorithm also increases the uniqueness and reliability of the PUF keys after processing. This increases the number of PUF keys that can be used for various applications.